On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 03:06:50PM +0800, Orlando Andico wrote: > putting /boot on a raid partition is difficult. > > because the kernel is loaded from the /boot partition. but the raid > driver code is inside the kernel. so how can you load the kernel if > you can't read the raid volume? > > that said there are ways around it. but they are not straightforward.
I have had pretty good experience with relying purely on software RAID 1 with two hard drives on a number of production servers, with everything including /boot within an md device. With this setup I've been able to boot off the secondary drive when the primary failed. From there I triggered a rebuild of the replacement primary drive. I mainly use LILO and, because I use XFS on my boot partition, specify raid-extra-boot=mbr-only in the LILO configuration. I have also had success with grub following this HOWTO: http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2003-July/008898.html I cannot provide the original poster with a step-by-step HOWTO on how easiest to configure software RAID 1 on Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn using the installer, but I am adding a +1 vote to relying purely on software RAID 1 (ie: boot, data, and swap partitions, nothing left to chance), and still being able to recover gracefully from hard drive failures without needing to restore from backups. Cheers! -- Federico Sevilla III F S 3 Consulting Inc. http://www.fs3.ph _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
