From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tokarev Subject: Re: RAID needs more to survive a power hit, different /boot layout for example (was Re: draft howto on making raids for surviving a disk crash) Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:04:15 +0300 Message-ID: <47A62C4F.3080409@msgid.tls.msk.ru> References: <47A612BE.5050707@pobox.com> <47A623EE.4050305@msgid.tls.msk.ru> <47A62A17.70101@pobox.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <47A62A17.70101@pobox.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Moshe Yudkowsky Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Moshe Yudkowsky wrote: > Michael Tokarev wrote: > >> Speaking of repairs. As I already mentioned, I always use small >> (256M..1G) raid1 array for my root partition, including /boot, >> /bin, /etc, /sbin, /lib and so on (/usr, /home, /var are on >> their own filesystems). And I had the following scenarios >> happened already: > > But that's *exactly* what I have -- well, 5GB -- and which failed. I've > modified /etc/fstab system to use data=journal (even on root, which I > thought wasn't supposed to work without a grub option!) and I can > power-cycle the system and bring it up reliably afterwards. > > So I'm a little suspicious of this theory that /etc and others can be on > the same partition as /boot in a non-ext3 file system. If even your separate /boot failed (which should NEVER fail), what to say about the rest? I mean, if you'll save your /boot, what help it will be for you, if your root fs is damaged? That's why I said /boot is mostly irrelevant. Well. You can have some recovery stuff in your initrd/initramfs - that's for sure (and for that to work, you can make your /boot more reliable by creating a separate filesystem for it). But if to go this route, it's better to boot off some recovery CD instead of trying recovery from very limited toolset available in your initramfs. /mjt