It's a new z97 board so EFI rules apply. I have some spare 3TB drives sitting around that I may try to practice on.......see what will and won't work. Still open to all suggestions and especially from anyone who's actually done this. On 12 May 2015 at 14:27, Wilson, Jonathan <piercing_male@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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
