Re: [cobalt-users] RAQ 2 Hard Drive

[Harald Kapper <hk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 13 May 2001 12:03:21 -0700, cobalt-users-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote to cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

>From: Harry Mueller <hmueller@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: [cobalt-users] RAQ 2 Hard Drive
>	I recently purchased a used RAQ 2 that has begun to develop 
>some grinding in the hard drive. I figure that the drive is going to 
>go any time and I want to replace it before it does. Does anyone know 
>what the maximum size drive the RAQ 2 will accommodate, what speed is 
>preferred (i.e ATA66 ATA100, etc.) and if I can put any IDE drive in 
>an restore the OS from the OSRestore CD?

hi harry ;-)
we regularely upgraded all RaQ2's we have (10 or so) and the rules are
easy: 30 GB EIDE fits it perfectly, have a look at the power-drain, as
the raq has limited power-supplies - our experience was that IBM HDDs
consume the least power therefore are my suggestion.

easiest way to upgrade: copy your old HDD using some disk-imaging tool
(powerquest diskimage pro worked perfectly for us) and resize the partitions
simply to fit it all.

futher suggestion: also resize the hda2 partition to eg. 512 MB and then
create logical paritions in it (afterwards when your raq2 is back online)
and add some more swap-space, especially when your raq2 is low on memory
this really helps ;-) - but beware: you should know what you do with
fdisk, /etc/fstab, mkswap, etc.

one fstab here looks as follows:

#cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda1               /       ext2    defaults                          1 1
/dev/hda2               none    ignore  defaults                          0 0
/dev/hda3               /var    ext2    defaults,nosuid                   2 2
/dev/hda4               /home   ext2    defaults,usrquota,grpquota,grpid  3 3
/dev/hda5               none    swap    defaults                          0 0
/dev/hda6               none    swap    defaults                          0 0
/dev/hda7               none    swap    defaults                          0 0
/dev/hda8               none    swap    defaults                          0 0
none                    /proc   proc    defaults                          0 0
----------------

while the partition table looks as here:
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2495 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1      192  1542208+  83  Linux native
/dev/hda2           193      256   514080    5  Extended
/dev/hda3           258      388  1052257+  83  Linux native
/dev/hda4           389     2490 16884315   83  Linux native
/dev/hda5           193      208   128488+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6           209      224   128488+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7           225      240   128488+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda8           241      256   128488+  82  Linux swap

-------

before you change anything using fdisk, don't forget to "/sbin/swapoff -a"
(to disalbe all swapping), then repartition, finally do "/sbin/mkswap /dev/hda5"
(and so on), then when this worked ok, do have your /etc/fstab-file changed
and "/sbin/swapon -a" should mount everything. check the result with
"free -m" which should give you something like this:

# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           156        122         33         19         65         40
-/+ buffers/cache:         17        139
Swap:          501          2        499
-----------

hope that helps, should similarily work for raq3/4 but as always, no guarantee
on anything, you do modify all this on your own, at your own risk and of course
you void warranty by doing this ;-)

hth,
hk