On Tue, 29 May 2012 23:02:14 -0400
Sam Varshavchik<mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Alex writes:
Hi,
I believe the ability to have /boot on RAID was removed in fc15 so in
fc16,
That's news to me. Both F15 and F16 were perfectly happy with /boot on
RAID-1, for me. I must admit that they were quite reluctant to do so, and I
did have to beat the crap out of both of them; and I lost two good weekends
fighting their insolence, before they finally agreed to /boot off RAID-1.
But after I showed them who's the boss, there were no complaints.
It's been officially removed repeatedly and works fine, at least on FC16.
It does need to be RAID 1
There were two issues that made RAID-1 for /boot in F15 and F16 a nightmare.
If your partition table starts at sector 63, you're most likely boned,
because grub2 too fat, with RAID-1 loaded.
Thats complete crap. The Fedora installer is utterly broken here. Grub2
is just fine. If you do the install by hand it all works fine.
Also, on some RAID-based system, anaconda kept generating a grub.conf that
was a complete work of fiction. That, of course, didn't help things either.
Fortunately, you can still boot in rescue mode, and run grub2-mkconfig to
regenerate a grub.conf that has some basis in reality.
Count yourself lucky - if it can only find part of an old RAID volume eg
a stale header the FC16 installer just crashed. FC17 has introduced a new
bug where you can't install onto a degraded RAID1 array, which prevents
all sorts of useful stuff working.
Now, if your partition table starts at sector 63, you're still boned. But
Nope. You can do it by hand.
not quite. If you're running RAID-1, it is possible, with the help of a
rescue disk, and with stable UPS providing insurance, nurse the server into
restitching all the partitions so that they now start on sector 2048, one
disk at a time, without having to back them up, and redo.
Bugzilla tells me that F17's anaconda has a better reputation in emitting
grub.conf for RAID-based system, so that's fixed. But, if your partitions
still start on sector 63, you're still boned. You must move them.
Nope. You can do it by hand. It's just Fedora installer breakage and the
rest is a myth of unknown origin.
Basically the Fedora installer is a mess. It's been going downhill for
years and it just gets worse each release. Unfortunately with FC17 you
can't really avoid using it due to the giant re-arrangement of /bin
and /usr/bin.
It doesn't help that the standard procedure for handling Fedora installer
bugs is close them wontfix.
Alan
