----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike McMullin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2007 7:23 PM
Subject: Re: [opensuse] Software RAID with existing drive
On Sun, 2007-07-08 at 03:44 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
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The Saturday 2007-07-07 at 15:02 -0700, Brandon Carl wrote:
> I recently installed a IDE RAID card (Syba Ultra ATA IDE card SILO680)
> in my
> linux box and mirrored one of my drives (250Gb) to another 250Gb drive.
> When
> this was done, I tried to boot into openSUSE 10.2 and it kept stalling
> at
> "waiting for /dev/hda1 to appear." I then decided to just try and boot
> from
> my original hard drive, and it stalled on "opensuse hangs runaway loop
> modprobe binfmt-ffff." I thought that was very odd, so I took out the
> RAID
> card and tried to just boot from my one hdd, and it worked, thankfully.
>
> Now I am wondering if there is a software alternative to RAID 1 that i
> can use
> with my existing hard drive. I have about 100Gb of irreplaceable data
> under
> the "/home/spleeyah/" directory, which is on a seperate partition from
> the "/"
> directory.
>
> I would like to be able to just copy this drive over to the other one
> and then
> set it up as a RAID 1 configuration, but I cannot find any information
> about
> how to set this up using Yast or any other tools.
> I found this tutorial:
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html but
> when I try to find "raidtools" in my software management, it doesn't
> show up.
> This is an internet installation with my repository set as:
> ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/oss/.
I think you got it wrong.
To create a raid 1 setup, first you need to empty disks, or two empty
partitions on two disks. Next you create the raid, and finally you copy
over the data.
However, if what you have is a lot of important files, it is way safer to
have two separate disks (better three disks), and simply copy everything
from one to the other, then disconect (and power off) or at least umount
the second. Notice that if on a raid setup you delete something or have a
bad software crash both mirror copies will be damaged. Raid doesn't
protect your valuable data from all mishaps: only a few kinds of mishaps,
like some hardware failures.
Ie, a good backup procedure is safer than just raid.
I've never used RAID but I was under the impression that RAID 1 and
disk failure was terminal, but the ones that use parity drives allow for
the rebuilding of the data drive if one gets hosed.
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Incorrect, with RAID 1, you have two partitions, or complete drives in my
case, that are exactly the same, both written to at the same time with the
same data.
If one drive fails, the other drive is there until you replace the hosed
drive and rebuild the array by copying the data to the replacement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID1#RAID_1
-Brandon
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