[CentOS] Help finishing off Centos 7 RAID install

Thu Jan 10 17:58:19 UTC 2019
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On Thu, 10 Jan 2019 at 11:35, Simon Matter via CentOS <centos at centos.org>
wrote:

> > On 1/9/19 2:30 AM, Gary Stainburn wrote:
> >> 1) The big problem with this is that it is dependant on sda for booting.
> >>  I
> >> did find an aritcle on how to set up boot loading on multiple HDD's,
> >> including cloning /boot/efi but I now can't find it.  Does anyone know
> >> of a
> >> similar article?
> >
> >
> > Use RAID1 for /boot/efi as well.  The installer should get the details
> > right.
>
> Are you sure? How is the EFI firmware going to know about the RAID1?
>
> RAID1 is going to have type FD00 (Linux RAID) whereas EFI firmware expects
> type EF00 (EFI System Partition) to boot from.
>
>
It works on our Dell and IBM systems. I have multiple systems with multiple
disk RAID1 /boot/efi disks.

part raid.300 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sda --size=477
part raid.310 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sdb --size=477
part raid.320 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sdc --size=477
part raid.330 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sdd --size=477
part raid.340 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sde --size=477
part raid.350 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sdf --size=477
part raid.360 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sdg --size=477
part raid.370 --fstype="mdmember" --ondisk=sdh --size=477

raid /boot/efi --device=1 --fstype="efi" --level=RAID1
--fsoptions="umask=0077,shortname=winnt" raid.300 raid.310 raid.320
raid.330 raid.340 raid.350 raid.360 raid.370

That said, I don't know what the low level items for it are or if this is
universal. From dealing with various EFI chipsets.. I am guessing the
standard is rather loose in what is EFI compliant :).


> EFI then reads the GPT table directly and looks for a vfat filesystem to
> boot from. Default Linux software RAID1 on EL7 uses metadata 1.2 which is
> located at the beginning of the partition. EFI won't recognize the vfat
> filesystem behind the RAID metadata.
>
> Maybe certain EFI firmware is more tolerant but at least in my case I
> didn't get it to work on RAID1 at all.
>
> I'd really be interested if someone got it to work, how exactly it's
> configured. How exactly do the GPT tables look, how exactly is the RAID1
> configured.
>
> Regards,
> Simon
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.