Bug 31958

Summary:	Is mdadm broken as well as MCC disk partition?
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Ezequiel Partida <ezequiel_partida>
Component:	RPM Packages	Assignee:	Mageia tools maintainers <mageiatools>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal	CC:	davidwhodgins, fri
Version:	Cauldron
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:		CVE:
Status comment:

Description Ezequiel Partida 2023-05-25 05:47:57 CEST

Hello,

Today I wanted to create a mageia 9 install with a mirror disk.

I tried with the mageia installer but I only got errors

Choosing Linux RAID on the disk type on both disk I was able to create Raid device md0, once both drives are joined in to raid I cannot install mageia on it.

I tried by booting with mageia live and used terminal and start all over again

As root I typed

fdisk /dev/sda to configure the HDD as Linux Raid

I did the same with /dev/sdb

I later created raid md0 and added both drives

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1


Once mirror started and I made sure it was done using mdadm --detail /dev/md0 I tried to install mageia to device Raid and it did not work.

It seems it does´nt support Raid level1=mirror on MCC

What if I need to install mageia as server and have my boot drive as raid 1?

This is what I want to do..

https://youtu.be/rJzHpc1kQW4

Regards

Comment 1 Dave Hodgins 2023-05-25 06:22:23 CEST

Assigning to the tools maintainers. I think the answer is going to be that
/boot must be on a regular partition, not part of the raid array so that the
initrd can be loaded, but I'm not sure. I've only used lvm raid, not mdadm
or dmraid.

Assignee: bugsquad => mageiatools
CC: (none) => davidwhodgins

Comment 2 Thomas Backlund 2023-05-25 09:12:32 CEST

yes, boot must be outside of the raid as it needs to be able to load kernel/initrd to load raid support

Comment 3 Morgan Leijström 2023-05-25 17:42:55 CEST

If not wanting to consume space on drives, i think you can have a small USB flash drive as boot.

CC: (none) => fri
Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => INVALID

Comment 4 Ezequiel Partida 2023-05-25 20:43:32 CEST

(In reply to Dave Hodgins from comment #1)
> Assigning to the tools maintainers. I think the answer is going to be that
> /boot must be on a regular partition, not part of the raid array so that the
> initrd can be loaded, but I'm not sure. I've only used lvm raid, not mdadm
> or dmraid.

I think I will test LVM raid... I did not see the mirror option on it but will look furter on this since this is the first time I´be worked with software raid on linux and I plan to move all windows servers to linux this year..

Thanks for the tip.

Comment 5 Dave Hodgins 2023-05-25 21:29:55 CEST

I should add, I was using lvm to make it easier to spread an install over
multiple small hard drives, not for data safety. I stopped using it after a
lightning strike took out 3 out of 5 isa drives, as well as the motherboard on
that old i586 system. Luckily, I had recent offline backups of critical data as
the new system did not support isa drives.

I switched to a newer computer with larger drives and added a ups. That was
years ago. Now I just make sure I keep good critical data backups. I avoid
data compression or software that uses it's own format for the backups, and
just use rsync.