Re: [gentoo-amd64] Upgrading to Raid

[Francisco Perez <fperez@albrookdata.com>]

Correct me if I am wrong since I have yet to have to deal with restoring 
failed disk in an array, but in a hardware raid, with my card I would 
just enter the card's bios after rebooting and then restore the new 
replacement drive from the secondary image (remember I am using raid 10 
with 4 disks.)  Is there something I'm forgetting?

Frank

Florian D. wrote:
> because there are so many people praising software-raid, you´ll probably 
> find this story interesting, which happened to me yesterday (my system 
> is -for the biggest part- on a raid5 partition):
> 
> while I emerged koffice, played some mp3´s and let matlab calculate sth. 
> in the background, I tried to start a windows program with wine. I 
> really shouldn´t do that, because Linux crashed and after a hard reboot 
> it could not boot any more. It stopped during the execution of the 
> init-scripts and i was not able to do anything, thus: 2nd hard reboot. I 
> have another(old) gentoo installation on my computer and this time I 
> booted into that one. By accident I realized that one of the discs of my 
> raid system has been marked as faulty and it was syncing in the 
> background. /proc/mdstat said that it would need 20min or so, but after 
> 15min it said 200min! After another 10min it was sth >300min (and a lot 
> of IO errors). So I rebooted again, this time it synced successfully in 
> 12min. Then it was possible to boot and work with my normal system 
> without any further difficulties or IO errors.
> 
> Summing up, I can say:
> 
> + I successfully wrecked my file system, but software raid was able to 
> repair it
> - without a second Linux-installation on another partition, you´re lost
> - restoring of a faulty raid disk is not reliable
> - it seems that it is not possible to boot or work with a system, whose 
> system disk is being restored at the same time (Linux-2.6.12.6)
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