ATA Raid on a Dual Boot (Win 2K and Linux [kernel 2.6])?
Hi,
lately my hard disks started reaching a fill level where I consider buying some new ones. Linux has been flawlessly running on a SW raid-1 for almost 5 years now (thanks a bunch to all the ones who contributed), but I always felt the lack of having such a solution under win 2K. Since there are some rather inexpensive (S-)ATA-Raid cards around I thought about buying one of those to finally mirror the Win-Partitions (I know the cards suck re preformance and all the rest of it). As far as I know, using kernel 2.6 (probably SuSE 9.2/9.3), there will be only dmraid supporting ataraid, but I actually could also live very well with a sw-raid solution (in fact I did for quite some time) and not be seeing the Windows partitions from Linux at all. So my question is the following:
Has anybody experience with the following setup:
- I would like to set up the two disks as a mirror raid set using the ATA-Raid card.
- A reasonable portion of the raid-set will then be partionend and used by windows.
- (Probably) I would actually use a DOS/Win based program to pre-partition the rest of the mirrored disks for Linux
- the remaining Linux partitions will then be used as a SW-Raid-1 set (with a LVM on top of it?).
As far as I know, Linux should be seeing all the partitions made for the "hardware" raid windows setup as being separate partitions on the two hard disks (identical layout). So I should be able to mirror them using sw-raid.
Has anybody done that? Is there anything that looks like it will be impossible to do? Any hardware I should avoid?
I am aware that I will probably do a lot of manual tweaking during the first Linux install, but I think I can handle that :-). Before buying all that stuff and put in the effort it would be reassuring if I knew it's feasible....
Thanks in advance,
Stefan
On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 at 4:40pm, Stefan Muenkner wrote
Quoted 10 lines
Has anybody experience with the following setup:
- I would like to set up the two disks as a mirror raid set using the ATA-Raid card.
- A reasonable portion of the raid-set will then be partionend and used by windows.
- (Probably) I would actually use a DOS/Win based program to pre-partition the rest of the mirrored disks for Linux
- the remaining Linux partitions will then be used as a SW-Raid-1 set (with a LVM on top of it?).
If you're willing to pay a bit more, you could buy a "real" RAID card (e.g. a 3ware 8000 series) with support in both OSes. Do a hardware mirror in the 3ware, and then both OSes will see a single drive via their native drivers. A 8006-2 (2 port SATA) is $130 on buy.com.
Signature · 3 lines
Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
Quoted 3 lines
If you're willing to pay a bit more, you could buy a "real" RAID card (e.g. a 3ware 8000 series) with support in both OSes. Do a hardware mirror in the 3ware, and then both OSes will see a single drive via their native drivers. A 8006-2 (2 port SATA) is $130 on buy.com.
My problem is: Here in Germany the cheapest 8006-2 I can get hold of is at just under 140 Euros (about $180) which is quite a bit more than I was actually thinking to invest. Well, I will consider it, technically it is a sweet solution....
Thanks,
Stefan
Quoted 4 lines · Stefan Muenkner
As far as I know, Linux should be seeing all the partitions made for the "hardware" raid windows setup as being separate partitions on the two hard disks (identical layout). So I should be able to mirror them using sw-raid.
i would not be confident in having md over a fakeraid, sooner or later the fakeraid will overwrite one of the two md superblocks with the copy from the other disk, so if you really want to do this, you should use dmraid instead.
note, there is no bootloader which is yet able to boot from lvm over dmraid, you will need a separate /stand for the moment.
L.
Signature · 6 lines
Luca Berra -- [email protected] Communication Media & Services S.r.l. /"\ \ / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN X AGAINST HTML MAIL / \