I've been having trouble finding accurate information about this on the web. I recently acquired a 2xdual-core opteron system based on Tyan's K8WE motherboard, which has NVidia nForce4 RAID support. I tried for days to set up a working ubuntu system with dmraid and LVM. I want to be conservative about data security, and the combination of LVM + RAID 1 seems to provide me with the best of all possible worlds. I think I may have gotten pretty close, but no cigar so far. There are a number of sites that claim to have instructions for doing such an installation, but none of the instructions work out-of-the-box for me. I've also seen claims that Fedora Core 5 supports installation onto a dmraid array, but also lots of postings from people for whom it has failed. http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=194455 describes what I've been doing. I think input is needed from someone who really understands the device mapper, dmraid, and LVM, and as far as I can tell, this is where all those people hang out. If someone would be willing to help me understand this problem I'll happily put up a webpage that explains all the missing information so nobody has to pester you about it again ;-) At this point I have been able to get dmraid installation to complete without error, but only twice. I tried to reproduce the first method and it failed in exactly the way described. The second method involved rebooting from the live CD, reconstructing the LVM partions into a filesystem, chrooting, and then doing another apt-get install. Haven't tried to reproduce that method yet. Anyway, at this point I have grub starting the safe-mode boot sequence, but it fails at the point of having mounted the root filesytem at /root. Apparently all that's there is one file: lost+found. In fact, at that point in the boot sequence, that holds true for all the LVM partitions. The /boot partition is a primary ext3 partition. That may be overly conservative, but at least it was clear to me that it would be reachable that way :) Note: I am currently setting this system up for multiboot, although eventually I plan to run Windows virtualized (e.g. under VMWare or Win4Lin). As I understand it, mdadm might be easier to set up but is not compatible with dual-booting into windows; is that right? Note2: In fact it may be a few days before I can work on this again; the machine has some minor hardware problems and it's going back to the manufacturer for repair. That said, I think I can still learn a lot in the meantime. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer, -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com _______________________________________________ Ataraid-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ataraid-list
