On my system (a dedicated fileserver running gentoo Linux) I partition all of my drives the same way:
P1 - 1 cyl - /boot
P2 - swap
P3 - 2G/RAID 5 - /
L5 - 4G/ext2 - / alternate
L* - 35G/RAID 5 - Storage partitions
I use lilo with a duel boot. Default boot uses the RAID 5 root. Secondary boot uses the ext2 root. This partition is copied onto every drive.
This way, I have all of the advantages of RAID 5 for my OS, but I can boot to a mundane partition if the RAID should break or needs maintanence (like adding another drive).
If the boot drive dies, I can boot from CD and chroot to any of the remaining drive's L5 partition.
I have tested both boots and it works quite well. The cost in space is 4G from a 250G drive. About a 2% overhead.
It could be argued that this layout would be more efficient if root were placed closer to the center of the cylinders. But this is not a very active machine. It basicly holds my large multimedia files while they wait their turn for processing (takes 100G to filter and process 1 hour of video). No data streaming applications. So I took the mental shortcut.
Hope this is useful.
Bob W.
At 12:03 PM 4/19/2004, you wrote:
Hi Paul!
Paul Phillips schrieb:
I was under the impression that I can't boot off raid-5, but if that information is dated then all the better. Thanks again.
Afaik, that´s still true. The reason is that the two (or more) drives of a raid 1 essentially hold the same data, and if you do everything right, the complete boot mechanism is on all disks, so that you can boot with any of them. On raid 5 disks, you would never have the complete data on any of the disks.
Norman.
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