On 06/07/2010 16:16, Kent West wrote:
Boasting that you “of course wiped W7 off” to then run in to problems with RAID and then come here, is amusing. Maybe you should do some research on RAID and how to do it in Debian, there are many helpful guides on settings up systems, however these are only guides and you also need to know how to recover from disk failures, raid controller failures and other such fun things. W7 has some very easy to use software raid tools which would have at least given you a helping start, I’m not saying they are the best, but they certainly are easy to get your head around.
Checkout some guides, check the archives and look up basic terminology, my fear is you will get a RAID1 set up for your data, to then spend countless hours trying to get your data back when something goes wrong, because you don’t know how to do it, something which can be all too commmon
So…, you’re saying that if I want to learn to use RAID, I should use Windows?
I’ve been doing research on RAID for the past week, and none of the documentation I’ve found addresses my issues.
Personally. I can’t see the point in using RAID for swap. So I use this partion on each drive as just a SWAP partition and add each swap in to give (in your case) 6G of swap space.
What to you envisage going in /boot? I make mine 100 M and that is always plenty.
I’m thinking this must be a bug in the installer’s partitioner. If I let the install create partitions automatically, the bootable flag is set. But if I unset it and then try to re-set it, or if I manually create partitions, I can not set the bootable flag. It stays “off”.
If you can’t find a better alternative
Alt f2 (I think its alt) to get an alternative console and use fdisk
If your system is actively using swap [1], and the disk that swap resides on fails you will experience abnormal process termination at the time of the failure or in the future as processes need those pages. Since some parts of kernel memory are considered swappable this could result in a kernel panic.
If you are using RAID to ensure high availability of the system, keeping swap on RAID is just as important as keeping / on RAID. If you are “simply” using RAID to avoid losing data, neither need be kept on RAID since all of your data should be in /var or /home.
[1] By this, I mean specifically that some virtual memory addresses correspond to pages that exist in swap space (on disk) and do not exist in RAM AND the process assigned that VMA will be reading or writing to that page before it is deallocated by the kernel.
It was the daily-build of the netinstaller CD I was using that is buggy. I downloaded the stable CD, used it to wipe the drives, rebooted, then followed the same process, and everything worked.
It still wasn’t easy, but it worked.
Thanks for the info!