Tom's blog

On the dev server I spoke previously, we add 2 hard drives of 500GB in order to have 500GB in RAID1 as a network storage. Here is the setup procedure: Check the disk sudo fdisk -l thomas@dev:~$ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 82.3 GB, 82348277760 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10011 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00059bfb Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 36 289138+ fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sda2 37 218 1461915 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sda3 219 826 4883760 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sda4 827 10011 73778512+ fd Linux raid autodetect Disk /dev/sdb: 82.3 GB, 82348277760 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10011 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000d96f2 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * ...

Today, one of the developer of 123Monsite.com mess up with one server, and this lead to this : They configure fake hardware on the mother board while it's a software raid... noticing it didn't work, they remove a drive to boot on a degraded raid... and try to find what's wrong... that's when I interrupt the massacre this lead to this : the partitions of the removed drive was marked as deleted (even if it has been replugged and fake-hardware disabled) : thomas@dev:~$ sudo mdadm --query --detail /dev/md3 /dev/md3: Version : 00.90 Creation Time : Thu Sep 4 23:15:23 2008 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 73778432 (70.36 GiB 75.55 GB) Used Dev Size : 73778432 (70.36 GiB 75.55 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 1 Preferred Minor : 3 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Mon Aug 10 22:45:33 2009 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : 6c7f5b4f:27e96317:a44ec9ef:2b057faa Events : 0.29...

Well... I could have waited 15 more days to have the stable version of Ubuntu 9.04 available for upgrade... but no... It seems I wasn't aware i've so much time to loose. So I've upgraded my kubuntu 8.10 (64bit) to the 9.04 version. All went smoothly until I reboot where I get this nice message : no block devices found (4 times) Gave up waiting for root device. ALERT! /dev/md3 does not exist. dropping to a shell! Apparently the raid configuration has been dropped during the upgrade. I've filled a bug here : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/358054 I don't know exactly what in my setup causes this, but it seems that it's a bug of the last kernel. Probably my raid setup. My computer is made of : P5N32-E Sli plus motherboard C2D 6250 4GB of RAM 2x 250GB SATA, RAID1 software for linux (sdc, sdd) 2x150GB Raptor SATA Raid0 for windows (fake raid from motherboard) (sda, sdb) To get my system back on line I just need to do this in the busybox shell : mdadm -As exit...

My main computer has a major hardware issue (probably the motherboard, maybe the cpu). I can't re-install windows, it crashes in the middle of the installation. To complicate things, I've installed my windows on a (fake)hardware RAID0. It's fake because the raid part is handle by the windows driver. That's why you can still see the hard drives under linux as /dev/sda /dev/sdb etc... even after having setup your RAID0/1/5 Array in the bios. As I'm not completely dumb, I've stored no critical data on the RAID array... But still, I wanted to check that fact (I'm not dumb ;) and get some non critical files, such as game save (I don't play that much recently... so sad, but it may change once Diablo III or Starcraft II is released). To get my data back, I've used a linux Distribution and use it's DMRAID capabilities. I've downloaded and burned the Gentoo Live CD . BTW, it's a really great distribution. I loved to installed it fro...