[CentOS] Manual Paritioning with fdisk

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 at 1:34am, Gerald Waugh wrote

> On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 06:19 +0200, dan1 wrote:
> > Hello, Gerald.
> > 
> > This is my personnal step by step documentation about how to install 
> > software RAID with CentOS 3 or 4.
> Dan,
> 
> Thanks for the info... Disk Druid was always a pain to me.
> I did get all the partitions into RAID1, except for /boot
> seems like when /boot is a raid array, the installer never ask where you
> want to put the mbr. Thus when you reboot, it can't boot up.

A couple of quick notes:

1) Setting up software RAIDs is really easy if you kickstart.  This is the 
partitioning section from one of my ks.cfg files that sets up a fully 
mirrored system on a box with 2 IDE drives (hda and hdc):

clearpart --all

part raid.01 --size=6144 --ondisk=hda --asprimary
part raid.11 --size=6144 --ondisk=hdc --asprimary
part raid.02 --size=4096 --ondisk=hda
part raid.12 --size=4096 --ondisk=hdc
part raid.03 --size=8192 --ondisk=hda
part raid.13 --size=8192 --ondisk=hdc
part raid.04 --size=1024 --ondisk=hda
part raid.14 --size=1024 --ondisk=hdc
part raid.05 --size=1024 --ondisk=hda
part raid.15 --size=1024 --ondisk=hdc
part raid.06 --size=1024 --grow --ondisk=hda
part raid.16 --size=1024 --grow --ondisk=hdc

raid / --level=1 --device=md0 raid.01 raid.11
raid /usr/local --level=1 --device=md1 raid.02 raid.12
raid /home --level=1 --device=md2 raid.03 raid.13
raid /tmp --level=1 --device=md3 raid.04 raid.14
raid swap --level=1 --device=md4 raid.05 raid.15
raid /var --level=1 --device=md5 raid.06 raid.16

2) If you use grub, by default a system missing the non-primary boot drive 
(i.e., if hda in the above system died) won't boot.  There are tricks out 
there to get a boot sector on the secondary boot drive.  *However*, if you 
use LILO, you can tell it that 'boot=/dev/md0' and it will automatically 
make both drives bootable.


-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University