I want to “upgrade” my opensuse 11.4 to opensuse 12.3 on my server.
I have a raid1 configuration of some of my filesystems because of easy backup (put second disk, sync raid, remove disk…)
Now I want to install opensuse 12.3 on a new raid partition BUT /boot must use old raid partition to boot old system as backup system.
How can I add the /boot as raid partition WITHOUT losing data on it?
In the partition setup of installation I created a raid with md0 and / of new partition to install 12.3
No md1 should have old raid1 partitions. If i add it the RAID optiont: Chunk Size 4kb will appear. After that I have chossen
to “Do no format parititon” and mount on /boot BUT IF HAVE DOUBTS that this will create a new raid array. I have no idea
if the chunk size was taken from the orig raid array or comes from the partition size as default.
And at least trying to mount without formating gives me the error: It is now allowed to assign a mount point to a device with nonexistent or unknow file system.
My fs is ext3 on a fd raid …
So my question how can I install without loosing data on /boot so I will be able to boot still os11.3?
is there no way to assemble a already well known raid? I could created a new /boot partition without raid and copy data but I will no have raid on that…
Sharing /boot between several systems is bad idea. There is no problem for each installed system to have own /boot if desired and it won’t prevent you from booting either of them.
You can’t. You do not mount partitions (though the saying goes, but it is very unprecise expressing it like that). You mount file systems. And on that partition, there is no file system to be detected.
You may think there is a file system on that partition, but in fact the partition starts with information about the RAID. The file system is on a diffeent place on that partition as it would have been when it was created on the partition itself.
But the problem still is the same. For example my home partition is also a raid1 partition and I cannot configure in the installation process.
Home is not so a problem because I can configure it after installing os BUT /boot is.
I never had problems to share /boot in fact I had only problems if I didn’t share /boot
I have installed before 12.3 rc2 on other machine and created a new /boot because of that the old system with grub2 does not boot.
Theey mangled the new kernel to boot with old system. Only if I used boot target “advenaced options” it goes to the original old grub menu which was installed in MBR
and there I can boot my old opensuse 12.1 (in fact a 2 stage loading)
I don’t want a 2 stage loading with menu I want boot every system from the intial boot menu…
But as noted before, the problem is not only this, the problem is how can I use an alread created raid to us at installation time…