Re: The Small Company's Guide to Hard Drive Failure and Linux

["Derek Vadala" <derek () cynicism com>]

Dave Aitel said:
> Ok, this is what I don't get - if you're using Software RAID on Linux,
> then what do you do when your boot drive dies? I'm looking for hardware
> RAID because I like the idea of a quick hotswap. I don't see how you
> could do that with software.

If I recall you are using lilo, not grub, which I recommend. Both you
disks are boot disks. Your boot and map lines in lilo.conf should look
like:

boot=/dev/md0
map=/boot/map

assuming that /dev/md0 is your where you want to boot from. Note that you
should have /boot/map.XXXX and /boot/map.XXXX, where XXXX is the bios
address of the real disk, after you re-run lilo. Don't forget to make sure
the root= line points to the proper place too.

This should be all you need to survive a disk crash. Unfortunately
sometimes you BIOS may not handle this as well as expected, and I've often
had to do things like disconnect the failed disk from the array, but this
arrangement should work pretty consistently for you, assuming you aren't
using really old hardware.

In the worst case, boot from a rescue disk and alter /etc/fstab to reflect
the raw paritions instead of the md devices, re-run lilo, and now you
system will boot as if it were just a single standalone disk.




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