From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Lem Subject: Re: Correct way to create multiple RAID volumes with hot-spare? Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:56:55 +1000 Message-ID: <1158130615.4500.9.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <44EB5579.4020200@maine.edu> <17644.55759.763091.379642@cse.unsw.edu.au> <4507212E.3060703@maine.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <4507212E.3060703@maine.edu> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Steve Cousins Cc: Neil Brown , Linux RAID Mailing List List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 17:05 -0400, Steve Cousins wrote: > 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. > 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. >From personal experience, partitions would be much easier. I've still got an issue on my RAID5 where one of the hard disks has a bogus/fake partition table on it (simply due to the data on the RAID appearing like a partition table). It causes problems with lilo and other processes at boot time (all non-fatal except for lilo). Perhaps with time I'll get lucky and the data in that particular part of the drive will be changed to something that looks nothing like a partition table :) Lem.