I am setting up a new box with dual 10GB hard drives, duplexed in a RAID1 software configuration with RH7.2. Installation was a snap once I figured out what it was trying to do (manuals? we don't need no stinkin' manuals), and it boots (GRUB) and runs great. So it occurs to me that, before I put this box into production, it would be prudent to see how it reacts to the loss of one of the drives. If the second drive - hdc, master on the second IDE bus (does "hdc" already tell you that?) - is disconnected, things run fine. So far, so good. However, if the first drive, hda, is disconnected, the machine will not boot. Here are my questions: 1) Do I somehow need to mark the second drive bootable, or active, or primary, or something like that? If so, how? 2) Assuming the catastrophe hits, what I really want to do is boot from that disk without having to do anything else hardware-wise. Can I boot from a floppy and tell it to use hdc to boot from? If this is my only option 3) How will I know when a drive goes bad? Can I configure the machine to email me - not to ROOT but an address I actually read sometimes, or even my cell phone or something? I have pored over RedHat's RAID documentation (sparse), the FAQ for this mailing list (also sparse), the RAID How-To (somewhat informative but outdated), Google, and even this list, which seems to be very low-volume traffic. I don't see the answers anywhere. They all, to one degree or another, talk about installation and configuration, and even re-mirroring, but nobody seems to talk about the one BIG reason you do RAID in the first place, or at least the reason I am doing it: to avoid an UNSCHEDULED nightmare. If one drive goes, I won't have to panic, but it does mean I have to do something very soon. But if it's the WRONG drive, and the machine needs to be rebooted, THEN it appears, right now, to be a panic situation. If you have the answers to these questions, or a pointer to a good resource, I'd appreciate it. TIA - -Frank PS: In case it's not obvious, I'm somewhat of a newcomer to Linux...I've used another OS extensively for 10 years or so, and its non-GUI precursor for another 8 years before that, but only into Linux for less than 2 years. I'm a comfortable newcomer...but still I realize there is far more I DON'T know than I do. So this might seem an obvious subject, but I'm just not "getting" it so far. - 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
