Arch Linux

Wilku

Member

Registered: 2007-07-04

Posts: 41

Raid Linux installation

Well, I've been using arch for some time, but I've never actually installed it on a disk matrix. I've got a JMicron Raid 1 set up on my computer and I would like to install arch on it. So any advice? Any drivers I should install before installation and how should they be installed? Will lilo go through it, cause I hate grub and I noticed that everyone with raids are using grub. So how should the general installation proccess look like and are there any problems I could have after setting up arch?

SiC

Member

From: Liverpool, England

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 428

Re: Raid Linux installation

You will have to use dmraid to get this working. Follow the fakeraid installation guide in the wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … _Fake-RAID).  dmraid works perfectly with arch, I ignored most of the wiki when I installed it as you can shortcut in places, but if you haven't used dmraid before then I would suggest you follow the instructions precisely.

I am not entirely certain as to how to get the installation working with LILO. I used to prefer it to grub as it was what I was used to, but I have only ever installed onto a raid with grub.  I would expect that you will have to do the same, although if you want to try it then it might work.  Any particular reason you prefer lilo over grub?

Wilku

Member

Registered: 2007-07-04

Posts: 41

Re: Raid Linux installation

Thanx, I'll try to attack the matter tommorow.

Any particular reason you prefer lilo over grub?

Well, actually I think lilo is easier to configure. At the very beginning of my linux adventure I was using grub until the day, when it said that it cannot load the system, because it is located on a block that is too far or sth. I don't quite remember, but I wasn't pleased with that respond. I tried to fix it, look on forums and things like that, but didn't find a straight answer, did many tries of modifing the conf file, but they all didn't fix the problem, so I checked out lilo and were happy until this day, when I have to install arch on my raid disks;)

So you are saying, that lilo may not run with raid?

SiC

Member

From: Liverpool, England

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 428

Re: Raid Linux installation

I don't know if it will is the answer.  One of the problems with Lilo is that it doesn't allow you to recover if you mess up the configuration, whereas grub gives you a command shell you can manually boot off.  I used to use Lilo for years, and I'll be honest, I really really like it's simplicity, but grub is better, in many ways.  I don't know why you had a problem booting off it before, grub shouldn't have any problems with locating boot sectors even at the end of the drive. Having said that I always ensure that my boot partition is the first one.

The biggest advantage that grub has though is that whenever you build a new kernel, you don't have to re-run lilo, you just install it and away you go, thats it.  That and I know that it works with dmraid means I just use it.

Wilku

Member

Registered: 2007-07-04

Posts: 41

Re: Raid Linux installation

Yeah, but I also use windows which is on the beggining of my hard drive, so I ain't sure if that isn't the problem

SiC

Member

From: Liverpool, England

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 428

Re: Raid Linux installation

Shouldn't be, ofc if that is the problem then you can just move the windows partition a little bit and then put a 100mb boot partition at the start of the drive and put grub on that, which would solve any problems. My suggestion would be to try to see if you can get lilo to boot from the raid partition, if it can't then you'll have to fall back to grub.

loosec

Member

Registered: 2007-03-08

Posts: 134

Re: Raid Linux installation

You can put the grub (boot) partition anywhere you want on the raid set and then installl grub to the raid sets mbr as in the wiki. I have no experience at all with lilo.

Wilku

Member

Registered: 2007-07-04

Posts: 41

Re: Raid Linux installation

So here's what I'm at. I tried to set up my arch using the 2007.08.01 build. I loaded the newest dmraid which was located on my pendrive. I loaded the modules etc. as in the guide you gave me. I run the command

dmraid -ay

and I got such an error:

ERROR: device-mapper target type "mirror" not in kernel

Please don't tell me I have to build the kernel by myself... What's the solution to this problem or should I just try with overlord?

My second question is:
Currently I've got 4 windows partitions on the beggining of my hard drive. They take about 200 GB. Now I heard that grub has problems if the /boot isn't located in the first 20GB of the harddrive. Is that true? Or won't there be a problem if I load grub to mbr and have my /boot on my first linux partition that will start around the 200GB of my 500GB hard drive.

byte

Member

From: Düsseldorf (DE)

Registered: 2006-05-01

Posts: 1,872

Re: Raid Linux installation

Did you modprobe dm-mirror?

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I hate sigs. This one only exists to remind myself to get an avatar.

Wilku

Member

Registered: 2007-07-04

Posts: 41

Re: Raid Linux installation

Well, I tried it a second ago and it went sth like this

modprobe dm-mirror
FATAL: module dm_mirror not found
modprobe dm_mirror
FATAL: module dm_mirror not found

byte

Member

From: Düsseldorf (DE)

Registered: 2006-05-01

Posts: 1,872

Re: Raid Linux installation

Ah, okay. I just read your "I tried to set up my arch using the 2007.08.01 build". That's probably the issue at hand. The latest ISO (the FrOSCon one) contains the module and also doubles as a nice rescue/textmode cd.

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I hate sigs. This one only exists to remind myself to get an avatar.

Wilku

Member

Registered: 2007-07-04

Posts: 41

Re: Raid Linux installation

So I gave it another futile try. This time I used the iso image you told me to use and the new problems started when I was about to partition the hard drive.
So here we have the ls -la /dev/mapper

ls -la /dev/mapper
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root       0 2008-09-02 19:27 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root       0 2008-09-02 19:27 ..
crw-rw----  1 root root  10, 60 2008-09-02 19:25 control
brw-------  1 root disk 254,  0 2008-09-02 19:27 jmicron_JRAID
brw-------  1 root disk 254,  1 2008-09-02 19:27 jmicron_JRAID1
brw-------  1 root disk 254,  2 2008-09-02 19:27 jmicron_JRAID2
brw-------  1 root disk 254,  3 2008-09-02 19:27 jmicron_JRAID3
brw-------  1 root disk 254,  4 2008-09-02 19:27 jmicron_JRAID5

and here we have the dmraid -tay

dmraid -tay
jmicron_JRAID: 0 976748544 mirror core 2 131072 nosync 2 /dev/sda 0 /dev/sdb 0
jmicron_JRAID1: 0 81920000 linear /dev/mapper/jmicron_JRAID 2048
jmicron_JRAID2: 0 122880000 linear /dev/mapper/jmicron_JRAID 81922048
jmicron_JRAID3: 0 104448000 linear /dev/mapper/jmicron_JRAID 204802048
jmicron_JRAID5: 0 131072000 linear /dev/mapper/jmicron_JRAID 309252096

I went to partition the hard drive, just as the guide said, I chose other and made a couple of tries:
first
/dev/mapper/jmicron_JRAID
and it returned me

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends in the final cylinder

when I tried adding any number on the end 1,2,3,5 it returned me

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition ends after end-of-disk

And when I tried to write
/dev/mapper/jmicron_JRAID*
it didn't even enter cfdisk, so what now?