Mikael, Some of the Maxtor 80gig disks actually are different. I have nearly forty of them and I've found at least three different varieties. My experiences with this particular model of disk are generally frustrating, though other Maxtor models have been very consistent and reliable. Aside from your quest to force the geometry and make it stick, which is necessary in your situation, you should not assume that the drives actually are identical just because they have the same sticker on them. The only thing that has worked for me is to partition them to the lowest common demoninator, which is using only 78 gigabytes from the beginning of the disk. I don't know if that is the highest common capacity but it's one that works for me and it might help you too. -Kanoa Mikael Johansson wrote: >Hello All! > >I'm supposed to set up a RAID-1 partition over two 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax >540X drives. The problem is that Linux (using Mandrake 8.1 distro) >identifies the # of cylinders/heads/sectors differently on both drives, >furthermore, differently from what the BIOS says. > >I ignored it and changed /dev/hdc to match /dev/hda definitions with >fdisk, and put up the RAID. All went without complaints, until I rebooted >the system. Now the system reverted to the old (mis)identified cylinders >etc. for /dev/hdc, and complained about misaligned partition boundaries => >not nice, esp. as I made a /dev/hdc1 partition of the same size as >/dev/hda1 (boot, non-raid) and moved /var there, which after the reboot >was gone... > >Finally to the question: is there any way to get Linux to believe that the >disks really are identical, and if not, how much of a performance loss can >be expected from putting up RAID-1 (and RAID-0 for swap) on not totally >identical partitions? > >Hope you can help me out, have a nice weekend, > Mikael Johansson > University of Helsinki > Department of Chemistry > mikael.johansson@helsinki.fi > > >- >To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in >the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org >More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > > - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
