On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 11:53, Michael Best wrote:
> /boot can be a raid1, but the anaconda installer only installs the MBR
> on one of the two devices, which I think it plain dumb, but it's easy to
> copy the MBR to the other drive.
Does anyone have experience with booting a machine with a dead
primary drive? I did a little testing long ago with an
IBM netfinity with scsi drives back when lilo installed
on both drives of a RAID1 and found that it would work if
you pulled the primary drive out. The rest of the
md pairs still matched up, but any single partition reference
would break because the device names shifted up.
However, a more common failure mode for drives is to be
visible at bootup but not actually work. Also, IDE controllers
tend to hang if any drive is broken, and since the drive
names don't change, won't the root reference be wrong
with a copied MBR unless you physically move the drive to
replace the broken one? I guess what I'm asking is whether
it is worth the trouble to install GRUB on the mirror or
if you'll have to do extra work anyway. If you have to
move the drives around you might as well reboot with the
install CD in rescue mode and reinstall grub anyway.
--
Les Mikesell
les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
