On Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:06:32 -0500 Greg Troxel <[email protected]> wrote: > > Gerard Lally <[email protected]> writes: > > > If I want separate / swap and /home, I presume I should delete raid1a > > and create raid1a, raid1b and raid1e instead (by clicking on its > > parent raid1 and selecting "Edit BSD partitions")? > > Separately from how to use sysinst for this (which I've never done), I > think it is sensible to have partitions within a raid. I typically > have wd0a/wd1a as type raid, being mostly the whole disk, and then > within raid0 have a/b/e/f. > > > I create these and proceed with installation as normal, selecting > > raid1 as the available disk on which I want to install NetBSD. But > > each time I do this I get the dreaded error "FATAL: No bootable medium > > found! System halted." > > > > Where am I going wrong? One thing I note is that I am not asked at any > > point to install bootcode to the disks as I would be with non-RAID > > setups. > > Probably you can boot to utility and run installboot manually on wd0a/wd1a. > > > If it's not possible to do this with sysinst is it at least possible > > to do it by dropping to a shell? > > When I want to set up a new raid system, I tend to get a bootable disk > with a minimal system and boot that and do the whole disk setup > including bootblocks by hand. But I suspect you are just missing > bootblocks. > > > Ideally I would like to use GPT with the RAID-1 setup as well, since I > > will be on 2 x 2TB disks and I anticipate this getting bigger, not > > smaller in years to come. I have successfully set up NetBSD with GPT > > by dropping to a shell but I don't know where to add RAID into that > > mix. > > As others commented it seems disklabel-in-raid-in-gpt works. So that > leads to having two raid sets. One is small enoguh to fit in 2T, and > would have root, swap, /var, /usr sorts of things. The other would be > just bare raid in gpt, and have a filesystem in raid0d. or maybe gpt > inside raid. The point is that the >2T raid doesn't have a disklabel > (because it's too big) and doesn't have root (because the bootblocks > can't yet find it).
Well I successfully booted a RAID system in Virtualbox yesterday evening! I followed Tobias's instructions, and also found David Brownlee's wedgeraidbootsetup.sh script** very useful. It's a lot clearer to me now what has to be done. Here is an overview for anyone else having trouble understanding the steps: 1) create a small gpt partition on disk0 and disk1 for boot; 2) create another gpt partition on disk0 and disk1 for raid; 3) assemble the raid using the components created in 2; 4) use gpt again to partition this raid array into / swap and home partitions; 5) build filesystems on these partitions; 6) mount the filesystems and extract sets; 7) install boot on the wedges created in step 1; 8) configure the system (fstab, rc.conf, etc) I'm happy again now! I was afraid I might end up having to install "An Inferior Operating System" on my 36 euro per month server! ;-) Thank you one and all for helping me understand this. ** Posted to netbsd-users June 2015: https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2015/06/16/msg016252.html -- Gerard Lally
