Hello,
I’ve got a mirrored data drive using software raid. It’s just a data drive and doesn’t have anything to do w/ my system or home drives. I’ve just got documents and photos and things on it. Nothing even to do w/ linux, as it’s mostly just where I dump files to share w/ other people on my network.
If I unplug the drives for hardware maintenance, and so obviously if a drive fails, the system fails to boot and says it’s unable to start mdadm, then asks me to log in as root for recovery mode.
How can I boot my system anyway? As I said, it’s just a data drive and has nothing to do w/ anything on my system or home drives.
Is there a way to set the raid to a lower priority or something so that the system will always boot even if the raid fails? And if that’s not an option, can you tell me how I at least make my system bootable from recovery mode when the raid is disconnected? (disable mdadm from command line, or remove it from the startup script or someting?) I’ve messed around a bit myself… removed the raid drives from fstab, disabled the mdraid service in services in yast, and the system still won’t boot if the raid is disconnected.
This type of problem normally means the hard drive is being mounted from your /etc/fstab file and this be behavior is normal. I am finding a few references to using nofail, nobootwait and of course noauto in your fstab file on the line mounting the raid drive with the latter requiring you issue a mount later and so not sure how good that is. You did not mention openSUSE version or desktop type to help you adding in this command.
I posted a question in the install forum, and maybe you have the answer… Whenever I try to upgrade my distro (11.3 to 11.4 and now 11.4 to 12.1) it doesn’t do the raid properly. It always fails to boot after the first reboot, w/ a failure to start MDADM… which, is the same error I got if I unplugged my raid drives…
If you know why that might happen, let me know.
Otherwise now that I have the nofail option I suppose I’ll try another upgrade and even if the raid fails hopefully it still boots.
