On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 11:08 +0100, Another Sillyname wrote: > I've tried to do some research on this but the information out there > seems a bit contradictory (mainly because some is so old). > > I want to install Fedora directly onto a RAID array (no separate boot disk). > > My plan is to 'pre configure' the 6 drives as a clean RAID6 array, > effectively sd[a-f] without partitions and then attempt to install > Fedora 21, from sources it looks like Grub2 should recognise the array > and then allow the Kernel to boot thereby 'enabling' the array to > become visible and active. > > However I have not been able to find an actual example of someone > trying this......thoughts? > > The reason to do this is I'm intending to use a Mini ITX board with 6 > sata ports and want to use 8TB drives in Raid6 to give me a very high > density data resilient small form factor storage box. Grub2 can handle booting into raid6, but some while ago the support was sketchy if the array was degraded; this may have improved. Your problem would be that it would require a biosboot (GPT, type:EF02, size:1 MiB) partition to hold part of the loader as it will not fit entirely into the "mbr." A second problem might be that while drives larger than 2 GB can be used on (most?) older boards they might not be able to be accessed/read correctly/bootable by older non-EFI bios's. My old MB was quite happy to boot from a 1 TB drive and linux could see and use my 3TB drives but the bios only saw the 3TB drives as 700MB (approx, I recall) If you are using an EFI system in EFI mode, you will need an EFI partition(s) somewhere. On my new system I have all 5 of my 3TB drives contain an EFI-dos partition of about 200-500MB and the the rest as one large partition for the raid6 containing everything else (/, /home, etc.). The only pain in the neck is remembering to copy everything from the "live EFI" (default loaded as "/boot") to the backup EFI's when ever I change/update stuff in it. > > Ideas/Suggestions? > > Thanks > > Tony > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
