anacanda: should we ignore the bios raid information on a disk when the raid is broken?

Joshua C. joshuacov at googlemail.com
Tue Oct 16 07:33:48 UTC 2012


2012/10/15 Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com>:
> Hi,
>
>
> On 10/15/2012 10:41 AM, Joshua C. wrote:
>>
>> 2012/10/15 Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com>:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>
>>> On 10/15/2012 09:23 AM, Joshua C. wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I have a broken fake raid on my machine (intel p67 chipset with one of
>>>> the disks missing) and when trying to install F17 yesterday (with
>>>> up-to-date respin done with pungi) I was greeted with the following
>>>> message "disk sdXXX has bios raid information and..... blah..... is
>>>> part of a broken raid, ignoring sdXXX". After ignoring the message
>>>> later on I wasn't given the chance to use the spare disk.
>>>>
>>>> I thought of patching anaconda to ignore the bios-raid-information and
>>>> to allow me to use the disk as I single HDD but I was wondering if
>>>> there are any side effects out of this?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, the side effect of this is that if we wrongly detect an array as
>>> being
>>> broken and allow the user to use it, we will destroy the array, nuking
>>> any
>>> data on it. IOW ignoring this error is simply not an acceptable option.
>>>
>>> What you can do is remove the bios raid metadata from the disk by going
>>> into a rescue shell on the system and run  wipefs on the disk in question
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Hans
>>
>>
>> I don't want to remove the bios data because this is the only way to
>> rebild the raid when the next disk arrives. Currently I'm using the
>> disk under Linux/Windows without any problems (in AHCI mode). Wipping
>> the bios data will remove anything when later I build (re-build) the
>> raid with the intel orom...
>>
>> Can I just install anaything on the second disk and then manually
>> adjust the fstab file to automount the disk from the broken raid?
>
>
> Assuming your raid array is a mirror, and that you won't be partitioning
> it or something similar, just adding the existing /home partition to
> your fstab yes that should work. Although anaconda will not let you
> touch the mirror member during the install, if you've another disk,
> putting Fedora 17 on that other disk should work fine, and after
> that pointing fstab the disk will work.
>
> BUT *IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT* you MUST remove the entry from
> fstab, before rebuilding the array, and then after the rebuild re-add
> the entry put now pointing to the raid and not to the single disk,
> otherwise Linux will keep using the single disk for your /home !!!
>
> Regards,
>
> Hans
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This is what I ment. I'll report back after the installation. Thanks

-- 

-- joshua


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