disk failure with swap RAID-0

[Doncho N. Gunchev]

On Friday 06 January 2006 16:38, Jack Howarth wrote:
>     In installing Fedora Core 4 on a new workstation here, the owner of
> the machine decided he wanted RAID-1 on all of his partitions except for
> the swap which he set up as RAID-0 across the two drives. I pointed out
> that this would make the machine fault intolerant since it will likely
> crash if half the swap disappears with a drive failure. He doesn't mind
> that but I am still concerned about the recovery from such a drive failure.
> Does anyone know what sequence you would have to go through to recover

Replace the bad disk and restore the RAID-1 arrays (mdadm). To boot from
the second drive you have to do some map-root-setup tricks with grub (search
grub raid1 in google for more info).

> in such a situation? Specifically is there a way to boot linux with the
> swap disabled for that particular boot? Otherwise I would imagine I'd have
> to use a linux rescue cd to edit the fstab on the remaining drive and
> change the swap back to a single partition on a single drive. Thanks in
> advance for any clarifications on this issue.
>           Jack

The machine will boot fine, just will not have swap at all. Why not use two
swap partitions instead of one RAID-0? This way at least one of them will
work (if one disk is gone).