[GLLUG] RAID1 and Debian 7.2.0 installer

[Chris Bell]

On Mon 14 Oct, John Winters wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 10:24:29 +0000 (GMT), Chris Bell
> <chrisbell at chrisbell.org.uk> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >    I have been trying to install Debian 7.2.0 to a Pentium 4 32-bit box
> >    with
> > a pair of 3TB discs configured with all RAID1 partitions. I believe that
> > GRUB2 can boot from / installed to a RAID1 partition, but I have not
> been
> > able to make any partition bootable.
> 
> I don't have a suitable system to hand to check, but my recollection is
> that the GRUB installation peers under the RAID and looks at actual
> partitions to find things to boot.  You thus set the boot flag when
> creating the partition, not in the RAID dialogue.
> 
> You may hit problems with partitions that size.  Have you consider a small
> (256M) /boot partition first, then a large LVM partition afterwards, to
> hold everything else?
> 
> Cheers,
> John
> 

   Thanks for the reply.
   Previous versions have allowed me to set each individual partition to be
used to contain RAID, on each disc, as bootable, so that either disc can be
the boot disc when configured as RAID1 and formatted, although GRUB2 was
only installed to the MBR of one disc. There is no line to configure the
RAID1 pair as bootable once the basic RAID layout has been defined. I have
just done a complete installation on to the machine with just the two 3TB
discs, but it would not boot.
   The machine has 512MB DDR400 (200MHz) ECC RAM, and Knoppix finds "two
3GHz processors", so I think it should be capable of 64 bit operation if I
can find more similar RAM.
   I am more interested in reliability than speed, although if an additional
IDE boot drive fails it should be easy to just replace that drive.



-- 
Chris Bell www.chrisbell.org.uk
Microsoft sells you Windows ... Linux gives you the whole house.