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In the Past it was only a Prophecy…but in the Future, the Past has Occurred!

Posts Tagged ‘raid’

Making Backups

Posted by jamba on February 22, 2010

Backups can be very important, no one wants to lose any of their data–especially if it has happened to you before.

I have previously setup my x64 desktop PC with softRAID, so everything I have in my /home folder is mirrored across 2 drives.  However, I am not sure if I am overly paranoid, or maybe I just like to be extra secure because now I have implemented an additional backup measure.

It started when I read some of this stuff about backups and solutions, so I decided I should probably do something similar.  The one from distrowatch really pushed me a long though, as the Q&A thing really made sense.

To start off, I began by reading the ArchWiki backup tools page: wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Programs.  I chose to try a few of them, I didn’t like arch-backup, backerupper didn’t really work the way I liked.  A few more just didn’t work for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in linux | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

some stuff

Posted by jamba on February 3, 2010

Linux RAID disk wipeout:

A common problem with Linux software RAID (aka md) happens when you try to use a disk that was previously part of some other disk array. Symptoms include: wrong volume size, unable to add device to raid, volume UUID mismatch. To fix the problem you need to use mdadm utility on the disk to cleanup:

# mdadm --zero-superblock devicepath
Building a Linux wireless access point
How to Remove Windows viruses with Linux
Create Linux Software RAID 1 (mirror) Array
  -Similar to the articles I have referenced before, when I wrote a series of posts about setting up my software RAID1 wich my Arch setup.

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The conclusion of My adventure installing Linux on softRAID1 (part 4)

Posted by jamba on September 30, 2009

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Finally…I’ve gotten around to doing this.  It has really taken a lot longer than it should have…but life is busy (I even went on vacation somewhere in there…AND stripped wallpaper/painted 2 rooms in the house.  haha).
“Installing softRAID on Linux” is a more fitting title, at this point–being the Linux has been installed and working for quite a while, whereas the RAID has not.

I have changed my intended setup a few times during this journey, and have finally settled on leaving my /boot and /(root) partitions NON-raid, operating off of my /dev/sda drive.   My home (which happens to be sda4) I have successfully converted to a dual disk raid 1 setup.

This document proved exceedingly helpful,  I absolutely recommend it regardless of distribution.   As everything was pretty much set up in my previous posts, all I did was add my entries to /etc/mdadm.conf using the command “mdadm -E –scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf” .   After that, I did a rebuild of initcpio with this:
“[root ~]# mkinitcpio -g /boot/kernel26.img“.   I also added my /dev/md2 into my fstab (along with the swap on the second drive).

With a reboot…everything worked magically.  The only thing left for me to do was to reformat my single disk /home directory (sda4) to Linux raid auto detect (type “fd” using cfdisk), and then assemble the array.  To do all this, I booted up from the Arch Linux live cd, changed the type of the partition, and then booted back into my normal setup.  I was then able to run “mdadm -A /dev/md2 /dev/sda4” to add sda4 to the already running array md2.  This started a rebuild of the array, syncing sda4 with sdb4.  SUCCESS!

I am all done for now…  maybe one day I’ll have the time to fiddle around with getting the root and boot partitions to work the same way…but until then, I am happy with what I’ve got.  This was my end goal in the very beginning, anyway: to have a RAID backup for pictures and other important documents, which are stored in the /home directory.

Maybe someone will find this helpful, and save some time.  It definitely did me good to take a break so I could observe some things I had done wrong (or incompletely).

Posted in linux | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

My adventure installing Linux on softRAID0/1 (part 2)

Posted by jamba on September 4, 2009

This is a continuation of Part 1.

After fiddling with Ubuntu and my RAID setup for a while, I got to thinking.  After every upgrade I would run into this same issue, and would have to re-do the array create/build/assembly process while making sure the kernel was placed properly, as well as the initramfs.

So… combining that realization with my positive experience with Arch Linux, I decided to give up on Ubuntu and proceed forward using Arch.  I have had no problems thus far with running Arch on my laptop, but on my desktop I will be much more focused on stability, rather than latest-and-greatest.  Luckily for me, they just annouced a kernel26-lts not very long ago–this is a kernel that will stay supported for a longer period of time with no major changes.  I will also put Gnome and Xorg on hold so they will not update automatically. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in linux | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »