Re: sata mirror with missing hard drive; fedora6 wont boot

On Sun, May 20, 2007 at 02:03:46PM -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> Ok, first off I think I'm way outa my league posting here.  I'm
> a fedora user, currently using fedora 6.  I have one of those
> FakeRaid systems, specifically NVidia raid on an Asus M2V-MX
> motherboard.  So I thought I'd give it a try, which by the way
> went smooth as silk to setup a Raid1 mirror and install FC6.  I
> was so happy!
> 
> Problem is, I cant leave well enough alone.  I just had to know
> if it would work if I unplugged a drive.  I did this while linux
> was up and running, froze the system for a few seconds then gave
> me a bunch of errors on the console.

The freeze is caused by the IDE driver timeout.

> Fine, though, I thought so
> long as it keeps running I'm ok.  Only it didnt, I listed a
> directory and the thing finally hung. 

Hrm, any error log you could provide for this ?

> 
> So then I thought, dont be discouraged, lets just reboot with
> one drive missing and see if a "degraded" raid mirror would boot
> and FC6/dmraid would do the right stuff.  Nope, hangs almost
> immediately after loading initrd.
> Looks like its unhappy cause
> it knows one of the physical drive is missing. 

Known issue. initrd has the mapping tables statically build in.
Fix is in the works.

> 
> So now I'm thinking I just dont know what I should be expecting
> out of a mirror raid, or maybe there is a way to tell the kernel
> to load with a degraded mirror by editing the kernel line?

No, initrd got to change to call "dmraid.static -ay" in order to
discover the degraded mirror and activate the available one rather than
using static information pointing at both drives (with one not existing any
more).

> I've
> been reading all sorts of stuff and hunting for some guidance
> but nothing so far.  So I found this list, and well, you know
> what follows when that happens e.g. a newby post.  
> 
> So please please please, could someone point me in the right
> direction? 

Maybe that helps.
You gotta wait for the mkinitrd update to fix the initrd issue.

> 
> Thanks!
> Bob
> 
> 
> 
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-- 

Regards,
Heinz    -- The LVM Guy --

*** Software bugs are stupid.
    Nevertheless it needs not so stupid people to solve them ***

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Heinz Mauelshagen                                 Red Hat GmbH
Consulting Development Engineer                   Am Sonnenhang 11
Storage Development                               56242 Marienrachdorf
                                                  Germany
[email protected]                            PHONE +49  171 7803392
                                                  FAX   +49 2626 924446
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