OK, I have managed to get software RAID 1 running on my wonderful Proliant server but now have two challenges:
1) Fresh after an OS install and reboot, the RAID array starts to do its stuff but straight away (as part of the boot messages) I am told that the second disk is 'not ready for command' and the system hangs as soon as resyncing starts. I think this is fixed by adding an hdparm line to turn on DMA (I was also losing ticks), but cannot check this because...
2) As part of the testing, I rebooted the system with the second drive pulled out, the whole lot then boots and I can use mdadm -a to add the second drive to the mirrored pair. The drives resync at a decent speed and the pair works fine for the duration, but when I reboot the second drive is not part of the mirrored pair unless I manually add it again.
Looking at the md superblock for the second disk, I am wondering if all the attempts at setting up the RAID array have confused it as this is what I get - the last section looks wrong (??)
mdadm -E /dev/hde /dev/hde: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.90.00 UUID : b0dcd24f:7044414a:1f0ba458:adabce9e Creation Time : Thu Sep 16 06:21:59 2004 Raid Level : raid1 Device Size : 193157440 (184.21 GiB 197.79 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 0
Update Time : Wed May 11 09:13:50 2005 State : clean Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 1 Checksum : 2652883e - correct Events : 0.15217
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 2 33 0 2 spare /dev/hde 0 0 22 3 0 active sync /dev/hdc3 1 1 0 0 1 faulty removed 2 2 33 0 2 spare /dev/hde
Any suggestions on getting this pair talking properly?
Thanks
Nigel