From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Ruth Ivimey-Cook" Subject: RE: Correct way to create multiple RAID volumes with hot-spare? Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:25:12 +0100 Message-ID: <000001c6d6ba$50819ad0$0e00a8c0@sherlock> References: <4507212E.3060703@maine.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <4507212E.3060703@maine.edu> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: 'Steve Cousins' , 'Neil Brown' Cc: 'Linux RAID Mailing List' List-Id: linux-raid.ids Steve, > The recent "Messed up creating new array..." thread has > someone who started by using the whole drives but she now > wants to use partitions because the array is not starting > automatically on boot (I think that was the symptom). I'm > guessing this is because there is no partigion ID of "fd" > since there isn't even a partition. Yes, that's right. > I'm on the verge of re-doing this array with 11 full drives > (/dev/sd? as opposed to /dev/sd?1 and /dev/sd?2). Will I > have the same problems with booting? I like the idea of not > having to partition the drives but not if it is going to > cause hassles. I realize that there could be a potential > problem if I need to replace a drive with a slightly > different model that is slightly smaller. That's the reason I ended up re-creating the array from backup, using partitions. You _can_ use raw disks, but it's not as easy. I worked out that I was originally having problems because my mdadm.conf file had the right drives (/dev/sdc ...) in the ARRAY line, but didn't have the same drives listed in the DEVICES line. I would suggest you do use partitions. Ruth