From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Robinson Subject: Re: md extension to support booting from raid whole disks. Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 01:26:11 +0100 Message-ID: <49FF87A3.4000707@anonymous.org.uk> References: <49F68CE0.2010906@zytor.com> <1240957153.18303.689.camel@ezra> <18935.35747.471257.202356@notabene.brown> <49F78F26.2040909@zytor.com> <1240963225.18303.858.camel@ezra> <49F7997C.2070808@zytor.com> <1240964410.18303.895.camel@ezra> <49F79F26.9060309@zytor.com> <1240965831.18303.944.camel@ezra> <20090429064333.GB9372@boogie.lpds.sztaki.hu> <87hc04leau.fsf@frosties.localdomain> <1241217394.4418.4.camel@poledra.romunt.nl> <87presxwu4.fsf@frosties.localdomain> <1241219902.9516.6.camel@poledra.romunt.nl> <87bpq8n6ym.fsf@frosties.localdomain> <1241470631.25901.130.camel@poledra.romunt.nl> <1241476412.11754.118.camel@ezra> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1241476412.11754.118.camel@ezra> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Daniel Reurich Cc: Linux Raid List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 04/05/2009 23:33, Daniel Reurich wrote: > I'd like to someone tell me how to get a partitioned scenario where the > partition that starts right at the start of the disk and includes the > bootsector, so that we raid1 that partition and have the bootsector > replicated as well? I'm sure there are hooks to allow automatic rebuilding of arrays when drives fail and are replaced. I don't know what they are (hotplug?), or whether they're used in any current distros. I do know some people have this automatic rebuilding; for example Netgear (ex Infrant) ReadyNAS devices, which are Linux based and use md RAID, do this. It can't be such a big leap to use such a hook to reinstate the boot sector at the same time as reinstating RAID metadata amd resyncing the array(s). Maybe current distros don't automatically do this because it only works if the user/OEM understands the particular case. I don't believe it can't be done using the existing partition table and md RAID-1 /boot arrangements, and it would be great if we (and more distros) had suitable scripts available, but I suspect it's impossible to generalise for all RAID'ed installations. Cheers, John.