On Friday, September 12, 2014 09:17:41 PM Joseph wrote: > On 09/12/14 23:52, Neil Bothwick wrote: > >On Fri, 12 Sep 2014 15:53:19 -0600, Joseph wrote: > >> I have two identical HD in a box and want to duplicate sda to sdb > >> I want sdb to be bootable just in case something happens to sda so I > >> can swap the drives and boot. > >> > >> Do I boot from USB and run: > >> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 > > > >If you remove the cunt argument as already mentioned, this will copy the > >whole drive, but it will be incredibly slow unless you add bs=4k. It also > >only copies it once, as soon as you start using sda, sdb will be out of > >date. Set up a RAID-1 array with the two drives, then install GRUB to the > >boot sector of each drive, using grub2-install and you will always be > >able to boot in the event of a failure of either drive. > > I'll be interested in setting up RAID-1. Is it hard? > I've never done it and I know there is plenty of information on line about > RAID-1 > > I'm not going to grub2 anytime soon. This machine has BIOS and the HD has > MBR partition. With recent problem I had with my other older box (that has > BIOS) and grub2 I'm not going to play with it. > > Is it hard to set it UP RAID-1
Grub2 can work with older style BIOS and MBR partitioning. I believe the issues you were facing was caused by the partitioning you were trying. But even with legacy grub, the steps are, mostly, the same. Check the Gentoo documentation for RAID+LVM installs and if you only want to use RAID, ignore the LVM steps. -- Joost
