When in YaST/System/Partitioner I try to create RAID for my second HDD which is named “sdb”.
My original “sda” hdd is partitioned as follows:
dev/sda, disk type
dev/sda1, linux swap, swap, swap
dev/sda2, linux native, ext3, /
dev/sda3, linux native, ext3, /home
When trying to partition second “sdb” hdd I go to “/dev/sdb” under “Hard Disks”, then create partition on “/dev/sdb” … new partition/maximum size, press next button, do not format partition/0xFD linux raid/do not mount partition. After that “swap” partition of the whole size of disk gets created.
However when trying “raid” in system/partitioner/add raid I end up with (“ERROR” there are not enough suitable unused devices to create raid).
Thank you for any pointers to the right direction.
It’s not really clear to me why you are trying to use RAID on one drive. The error message occurs because you have only one drive of type 0xFD. You need to have at least 2 for RAID 0 or 1, 3 for RAID5, or 4 for RAID6.
If you want to use just one drive, you can partition it into multiple partitions of the same size, but unless you are just testing it out, there isn’t really any reason to do this. You won’t have any redundancy nor speed increase from it.
Anyway, it is indeed sensible to build a degraded RAID1 set, with just one device, already holding data. In fact that is the optimum way, you may be installing into detached member of old OS mirror, or have moved a disk from a server, from old machine which retains it’s copy of the data untouched in a degraded RAID set.
Think I filed a bug report on this, cannot remember what happened. If I didn’t file it, then please file, and post the link here, and I’ll comment I found that to.
I have 2 physical hdd. First one I use for current opensuse OS, second one is empty. When I connect second one to motherboard it gets recognized as /dev/sdb since first one is under /dev/sda. Now I want to configure second one (/dev/sdb) to use as raid 1. Did I miss something?
So, you are trying to mirror sda with sdb? It sounded like you were asking to make a RAID with just sdb, that is why I was confused.
I’m not sure if you can do what you are asking about through Yast. But you should be able to do it with the command line tools.
Basically, you need to use fdisk to change the type of sdaX to 0xfd and sdbX also to 0xfd. Then use mdadm to create the md0 array with sda and with sdb as “missing”. Then have it add the missing drive back to the array and rebuild.