mdraid on install

[Guest]

Ok, so I am a very long time redhat/fedora/gentoo user and am seriously considering a jump to kubuntu since 1) i am tired of 2 day installs (gentoo stage3) and 2) having to cludge together a decent kde setup in a gnome based distro (fedora). I have kubuntu installed on couple of machines and I am really impressed with how much configuration i used to have to in fedora is already done and how much of what i used to have to compile from source is already in a repository in kubuntu. so, that being said, i went to put it on my main workstation today and to my surprise i couldn't figure out how to install to a software raid. mdraid to be specific. this is unfortunately a requirement for me, and no i cannot install to one partition and then mount raid volumes. root needs to be striped.

So i thought, well, maybe if the raid volumes already exist the kubuntu installer will used them so i popped in a gentoo minimal install cd and created the partitions and arrays with fdisk and mdadm. formatted them ext3. rebooted into kubuntu installer and nada. unknown partition. which is strange becuase the kernel should reassemble the arrays based on uuid so at the very least i would expect the installer to detect the partition type (linux raid autodetect - fd) correctly.

i found a process to install 7 to an mdraid setup but it doesn't appear that i can apply to 8 (and it was kind of a hack anyway) because the options it says to select don't exist in 8 (as far as i can tell, anyway). I can't imagine that a distro as well thought out and polished as this one would be missing such a basic feature so someone please reply and tell me i missed something really stupid so i can kick myself and get on with it.

thanks for the help,
joseph

[marconie]

Re: mdraid on install

I am not an expert but I managed to RAID two 40G HDD on an old PIII after so many experimentation. No PCI controller card. Just direct connection to the IDE sockets. Here's how I did it.

1. Gparted partitioner.
2. Partitioned hda into 5G boot; and the balance as ext3.
3. Partitioned hdb into Linux swap (depends on your RAM); and the balance as ext3 again.
4. Installed KUBUNTO 7.10 (GUTSY) ALTERNATIVE CD. There is an option to "install" RAID" through text based install.
5. During the partitioning routine, you have to create the RAID volume, format and activate the volume. The RAID will be made of the two unused partitions.
6. Activate also the "boot" and "swap" partitions.

I had difficulty going around the partioning rountine but after several retrials, I finally made it.

Just one caveat, as this is a software RAID, I am not satisfied with the speed (probably I expect too much). A hardware RAID would be definitely faster.

Another thing, what I probably managed to create was RAID-0 and I don't how to set the other RAID types.

I hope this helps and good luck.

Marconie

[ghillan]

Re: mdraid on install

the alternate installation CD allows you to create software raid in similar way you do it with fedora. I used soft raids with fedora and as far i saw there are the same options ... but to be honest i just locked into the options.. not really installed one (but i don't expect much difference between different distros )