Re: [cobalt-users] Creating RAID on RaQ-4i without 4r-OS

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jelmer Jellema wrote:

> Questions:
> - could I startup a raid on my 4i by putting in a second disk withoud
> loosing everything on the first?
> 
> I peeked around and found mkraid and startraid and /proc/mdstat. this would
> ofcause be without GUI-support.

Read the "Raid How-To" (or maybe it's the "Raid Mini-How-To" on the Red
Hat site (http://www.redhat.com/).

My guess is that Cobalt doesn't maintain seperate kernels, and that the
recent RaQ4 kernels (from recent updates) are most likely all
RaQ-enabled.  However, I'd sure find out before breaking the RaQ, if it
were mine.

The biggest problem is that some kernels (the RaQ's?) don't allow
booting from a Raid volume; if that's the case with the RaQs (and I
think it is, because someone from Sun wrote in that RaQs have a non-Raid
"boot" partition for this very reason), then you won't be able to boot
from the RaQ unless you figure out a way to create a new "boot"
partition on your primary disk; one that's NOT Raid-enabled.  Impossible
to do while the system is up, extremely hard to do in any linux box
without reformatting, probably impossible in a RaQ.  If possible would
probably require a separate box and a good knowledge of "ghost" or
"drive-copy".

> - Would starting a raid on linux level break the 4i GUI?

No, it shouldn't.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Linux and Cobalt/Sun/RaQ Consulting
nobaloney.net
P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA  92517
voice: (909) 778-9980  *  fax: (702) 548-9484