RAID 1 - easy as pie

This server was down a bit during the day when I installed the new 3Ware RAID IDE Controller and moved a couple of directories to a mirrored disk. The process was more or less painless but I learnt a couple of interesting tid-bits.

Computers don’t turn themselves on, when they don’t have power. That means - if nothing happens on pressing the BRS, check that the connector from the power supply is firmly seated in the motherboard. (Turns out that I partially unplugged mine when fumbling with additional IDE cables.

A midi tower is not enough for a server Nobody thought that a midi sized PC would have more than 2 IDE 3.5" drives, so no provisions are made to add more. With some creative use of existing space, a folded piece of paper as electrical insulation and hope that nobody will rattle the box too much, the second mirrored drive lies in a 3.5" floppy bay (of which there are two for some reason, but no provions for holding a harddisk. Go figure.

RAID is simpler than it seems Power up the computer, go to the RAIDs card BIOS, select the two drives, select create RAID1, select Done. The Linunx installation recognizes a 3Ware driver. At a root prompt “/dev/sda” which automagically loads the SCSI drivers (this RAID looks like a SCSI disk to the OS), fdisk to create partitions, mount it, mkreiserfs, copy the data over, enter the new paths in /etc/fstab instead of the old ones, reboot - done.

You should update your blog I know how to solve the slowness of this server I blogged about it - but I didn’t enter all necessary information. Bad. The blog is my external memory, so I’d better keep it up to date…. (which I have done now)