Question:
Correct me if I missed something, but wasn't the third "spare" intended
to be an exact mirror so that it could replace either the first or
second drive?
For the "spare" to be a replacement for either the first or the second
drive it also would have matched the exact partition structure of the
first two. In this particular sense the "spare" is really no "spare" at
all, but a sort of emergency last ditch fail-safe in the event that
either the first or second drive failed. This also means that the for
the RAID 1 system to function with a fail-safe option/strategy the third
drive had to be prepared properly so that it could potentially replace
any one of the other two at any time.
Zeroing the RAID superblocks and attempting to make the Apple partition
bootable via ybin may have been mistakes; however the strategy to dd the
second (or first) drive onto the "spare" appears reasonable.
Is it possible to reformat/restructure all three disks, using YDL, so
that function is restored?
On 12/13/10 2:37 PM, Matt Brock wrote:
Hi there.
(I posted this onto the YDL forums earlier today, so apologies to
anyone who's seen it twice.)
I've been using YDL on Xserve G5s for a couple of years now and it
does a great job. Recently I decided to rebuild one with software RAID
to get disk redundancy. I did all of this through the installer. The
server has three disks, so I set them up as RAID 1 with a spare.
This has all gone very successfully apart from one detail. The two
disks in the RAID set are bootable, i.e. I can remove either of those
disks and the machine will still boot as normal. That's fine so far.
Then I permanently removed the first disk and brought the spare third
disk into the RAID set instead. Once the RAID set is then fully
rebuilt I can boot off the original second disk, but the third disk
which was previously the spare disk is not bootable. It gets to the
first yaboot stage, and then the blue icon which represents OpenBoot
failing to find a boot disk appears superimposed over the yaboot
screen. That process just loops over and over again and never boots.
I've tried using ybin to make the Apple boot partition bootable with
the correct yaboot config, but that didn't help. I've tried dd-ing the
entire second disk onto the third disk then zeroing the RAID
superblocks, and that didn't work. I've tried resetting the NVRAM and
that made no difference. I'm sure it's not a hardware problem with the
disk because I've tried this twice now with the disks in different
slots each time, and it's always the spare disk which has the boot
problem even though that's a different physical disk each time.
I hope there's someone out there who can help because I'm tearing my
hair out over this. I can't see what else would be needed to make the
third disk bootable... yet there must be something! Without getting
this working the full redundancy I'd hoped for can't be achieved,
which would be extremely frustrating.
Cheers,
Matt.
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