Problems Installing RAID1 using 11.3 OpenSuSE installation

English Install/Boot/Login
1

My system is an AMD dual core x86_64 populated with 4 SATA 2TB hard drives.

Using the partitioning section of the installation tools I layed out the
following partitions:

sda:
sda1 1.95TB type FD (RAID)
sda2 50GB type FD (RAID)

sdb:
sdb1 1.95TB type FD (RAID)
sdb2 50GB type FD (RAID)

sdc:
sdc1 2.0TB type FD (RAID)

sdd:
sdd1 2.0TB type FD (RAID)

I then moved onto the RAID section of the tool and laid it out like this:

md0: “/” type ext4 (root file system) partitions sda1 & sdb1
md1: swap type swap partitions sda2 & sdb2
md2: “/home” type ext4 partitions sdc1 & sdd1

This worked fine and was fairly easy to setup. The rest of the installation was
straight forward.

When the tool went to write this to the hard disks it formatted and seem to
work just fine but when the boot loader GRUB was being written, the system would
fail. The error (15) was reporting a missing file and the GRUB installation
seemed to be complaining about stage 2 of the boot loader.

I was convinced by someone who is somewhat knowledgeable in the IT industry to
try the Ubuntu Server installation. It worked perfectly. It also followed
pretty much the same procedure to setup the partitions and then the RAID
configuration.

So, what gives with OpenSuSE’s 11.3 RAID installation?

Cheers!!

2

Hello
I have exactly the same problem, I tried a lot of things last night like:

  1. partitioning with “/boot” , “/” and “swap” in different order . Then make a mirror set.
  2. having a md0 set just for “/boot” and a md1 set for “/” and leave “swap” out of mirroring.
  3. trying ext3 as a file system.

No luck. Then I tried the BIOS hardware mirroring, also there I cannot install 11.3.
On the first harddisk boot it’s stuck with a strange graphical screen…

I think I have to revert back to 11.2.

pfeifp

3

Hello
just found the simple solution: (I’m running now 11.3): I created a /boot partition like I had on my old installation on 11.1, but the Installer does not automatically want to activate /boot. You have to “TELL” it, once clicked on the Install summary “use /boot” it all worked fine.
The only thing I then needed to also install was the NVIDIA graphics drivers and all was fine.
pfeifp

4

glad you got it to work I ended up moving to Ubuntu server and performed their installation for RAID. It worked flawlessly and so that’s what I’m sticking with. OpenSuSE is prettier but then so is Paris Hilton. OpenSuSE had better be careful or they will become just as useful.

Cheers!!

5

Installed openSuse 11.3

create the folioing partition table as linux raid

/dev/sda1 100M /boot
/dev/sda2 16GB Swap
/dev/sda3 20GB /

/dev/sdb1 100M /boot
/dev/sdb2 16GB Swap
/dev/sdb3 20GB /

create the meta devices accordingly as raid 1

/dev/md0 /boot
/dev/md1 swap
/dev/md2 /

continue the installation
the install will reboot

the next boot filed with Grub error 22

the boot menu is displayed

press c to get to the grub prompt

enter

  1. root (hd0,0)
  2. kernel /boot/vmlinuz
  3. initrd /boot/initrd
  4. boot

the system will boot
now we need to change the boot loader to select the right disk to load the kernel

have a look at /boot/grub/menue.lst

and make sure that the (hd0,0) or what ever it in your place has the correct partition number.

in my case is was (hd0,5) where it should have been (hd0,0)

reboot

them for some reason the system would not find the mirror /dev/md0 (/boot) and would not boot.

login at the single user prompt:

cat /proc/mdstat

I saw that

linux:~ # cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md1 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
103412 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU]
bitmap: 0/13 pages [0KB], 4KB chunk

md0 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1]
1059828 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU]
bitmap: 0/9 pages [0KB], 64KB chunk

unused devices: <none>

there was not 3rd device for my boot partition
for some unknown reason my root partition used /dev/md0 instead of /dev/md2

I was able to start my /boot mirror using

madam -v -A --run --force /dev/md2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

this verified that the mirror was still working.

So I edited the /etc/mdadm.conf as followed

DEVICE containers partitions
ARRAY /dev/md1 UUID=4e481b67:ce7a1219:0889b359:2cde2ef6
ARRAY /dev/md1 devices=/dev/sda1,/dev/sdb1

ARRAY /dev/md0 UUID=9754b70c:8dbe0199:87143aca:99bf4ad9
ARRAY /dev/md0 devices=/dev/sda2,/dev/sdb2

ARRAY /dev/md2 UUID=6ef98d1b:eb3b7e43:214a93bd:387be619
ARRAY /dev/md2 devices=/dev/sda3,/dev/sdb3

Now the system boots ok

In order to make both disk bootable