Russell Coker wrote:
>On Wed, 30 Jan 2002 17:54, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>>>detected the drive, but during the part that "lilo: " is supposed to come
>>>up, nothing did. The disk kept grinding and grinding, and eventually
>>>asked for a floppy. I was hoping that the 2nd, working drive in the raid
>>>array would kick in any moment, but that didn't happen. Everything
>>>stalled right there.
>>>
>> Lilo would have to know about your RAID setup (and of course it doesn't),
>> that's why it's not recommended to use software RAID on the root
>>partition.
>>
>
>Who recommends that you don't use software RAID on the root file system?
>
>Not me (lilo maintainer and user of this), not the lilo author, not the
>software RAID kernel maintainer.
>
Sorry, I'm not up to date on the newest features of LILO (it's cool
that is supports SW/RAID now, btw), I stated this because of what I read
on the Software-RAID-HOWTO.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html
'The latest official lilo distribution (Version 21) doesn't handle RAID
devices, and thus the kernel cannot be loaded at boot-time from a RAID
device. If you use this version, your |/boot| filesystem will have to
reside on a non-RAID device. A way to ensure that your system boots no
matter what is, to create similar |/boot| partitions on all drives in
your RAID, that way the BIOS can always load data from eg. the first
drive available. This requires that you do not boot with a failed disk
in your system.'
It is stated there also that you can boot root RAID filesystems, but it
requires some tweaking (applying some RedHat patches to lilo,
installing on a spare disk, then copying the installation on the RAID
fs...), which is less straightforward than having the / partition on a
normal device.
Btw, while searching for the howto, I found several of them dealing with
the issue:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Root-RAID-HOWTO.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Boot+Root+Raid+LILO.html
>
>> I'd say software RAID should be used on data partitions, and keep a
>>backup of your root partition somewhere, so that when the disk holding it
>>fails, you just swap in a new one and recover your root backup. When a disk
>>holding the data partition (on sw/raid) fails I assume it'd work as
>>advertised.
>>
>
>If the primary disk fails and the BIOS and boot loader don't allow booting
>from the second disk then you just have to physically swap disks (which is
>much less effort than swapping disks and restoring from backup).
>
>> You can't be 24x7-high-availability with software raid only, there's
>>always some down time involved with it, or at least a higher risk of
>>downtime than with hardware raid.
>>
>
>Actually LinuxBIOS could solve this issue...
>
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