Thanks Murty, unf was a bit late for me. :-) I have successfully "upgraded" to RH 8. Tho it was more of a controlled rebuild than a true upgrade. Possibly for the best, at the end of the day, esp given the number of changes in core daemons between RH7.3 and RH8. Do note that I have not yet had to do a kernel re-compile. As discussed earlier, I used an old 3Gb drive and built a basic RH8 system on that. (as hda). Without touching my existing ataraid disks. One nasty side effect: when the new rh8 system came up, it mounted the ataraid'd /usr partition without being ataraided (from memory: /dev/hde1 vs /dev/hda5). Unf I have 4 drives in a raid 0 stripe (e -> h), so all sorts of things failed. Suggestion: don't let the new RH8 system go beyon RL3. At this stage you should only have a minimal system in any event. Luckily enough system tools existed on the root partition for me to modify /etc/fstab and replace the "LABEL"s with the direct locations of those partitions. With backups of the ataraid'd /, /usr, /var partitions, I mkfs'd those partitions. Then used dump/restore to move the new RH8 partitions across. For those who've not done this before, a quick example: mkfs -t ext3 /dev/ataraid/d0p1 mkdir /tmp/usr mount /dev/ataraid/d0p1 /tmp/usr cd /tmp/usr (should now be in a new partition/filesystem) dump -0 -f - /usr | restore -r -f - A bit of fiddling with the newer fstab, to load the ataraid partitions. Similar with lilo. Did have to create an initrd with ataraid and pdcraid in it. Once you successfully boot off the new disks, there are no further problems. RH8 doesn't (appear) to care any longer about what's under the filesystems. Sucess at last! Comments? On the down side, I am not thrilled that I had to klude the upgrade together like that. Of the flip, I prefer having a "known" virgin install that I can use as a "rescue" environment. So having the extra disk is normal operation for me - where I can get away with it anyway. I really like Murty's suggestion for comparing performance measurements between ataraid and "normal" raid - must try that.... Off topic for this list, but I was unhappy that the standard package installer will not (obviously) allow for any other locations for packages than via CD. I have created ISO's from the original CD's and loop-back mounted them, so this was quite annoying. - Steve On Sat, 14 Dec 2002 17:08, Murty Rompalli wrote: > Hi > > I think the following should work and if so this approach is > simpler. > > 1. Boot off the install CD like you normally do. Switch to second console > and see /proc/pci. Calculate your Append Line > > 2. Now, reboot with install CD but this time with the Append Line at the > boot prompt. > > 3. You should see both disks as regular IDE disks during > installation. Choose RAID and install software (md) raid > I recommend RAID 1 atleast for /boot (/ if no /boot) unless ofcourse > you intend to build a system with md raid and not ataraid > > 4. After everything is complete, recompile kernel for ataraid and reboot > the machine to launch Linux with ataraid instead of md raid > > If this method works, one can additionally collect some performance data > at the end of step 3 above and compare them against similar data collected > at the end of step 4. Although you may decide to use ataraid, such > comparison may be interesting. > > Again if this method works and because md and ataraid are similar, we > should look into the code behind that RAID button and implement install > time ataraid. > > Murty Rompalli
