Soft-Raid Testing and other stuff...

Richard Hobbs richard.hobbs at crl.toshiba.co.uk
Tue Jan 18 15:23:20 UTC 2005


Hello,

I have built two RedHat 8.0 machines, both using soft-raid to mirror one
250GB disk onto the other identical 250GB disk inside the case.

During the install, I created the RAID partitions, and assigned them to
actual partitions, and now I have "/dev/md0" up to "/dev/md7".

However, each time I boot and each time I shut down, I get the following
message:

  No spare disk to reconstruct array! -- running in degraded mode.

What exactly does this mean? Both drives are visible from the BIOS, and the
jumpers are set to Cable Select (not Master and Slave).

Despite the above error message, the machine boots fine, shuts down fine,
and runs fine.

However, if I unplug the master hard drive, it will not boot from the
secondary, even if I plug it into the primary socket on the IDE cable.

I have even tried inserting a third 250GB hard drive on the secondary IDE
channel to see if that would become the spare disk it needs to reconstruct
the array, but that didn't work either.

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong here? Should the disks be physically
set to master and slave? Do I need to do something else to the RH8.0 config
to make it work? I'm really confused...

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

Hobbs.

-- 
Richard Hobbs (Systems Administrator)
Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. - Speech Technology Group
Web: http://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/
Email: richard.hobbs at crl.toshiba.co.uk
Tel: +44 1223 376964        Mobile: +44 7811 803377



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