Topic: raid-1 drive size problem

[Jon]

I just upgraded from one 30GB drive to two 30GB drives using a clean install and the e-smith raid-1 installation. Now it shows only a single 15GB drive.Is this normal? I had the full 30GB with just the one drive.

[Lloyd Keen]

Jon,
at the prompt type "cat /proc/mdstat" it will give some info as to what partitions have been added to the array. Post the output, it might be helpful.

[Jon]

I have 2 western digital 30GB hard drives, here is the output that i got.

[root@server1 /root]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md2 : active raid1 hdb5[1] hdb1[0] 264960 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md0 : active raid1 hdb7[1] hdb6[0] 15936 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 hdb8[0] hda1[1] 14739520 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices:

[Lloyd Keen]

Jon,
Here is what the output of a properly configured array should look like
[root@e-smith lloyd]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md2 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0] 263040 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md0 : active raid1 sdb5[1] sda5[0] 11136 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 sdb6[1] sda6[0] 8683392 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices:
You'll notice that for /dev/md0 I have the same partitions used ie /dev/sdb5 and /dev/sda5 and the same for all 3 of the md devices. My 2 drives both have 3 partitions on them each (/swap, /boot and /), but with your setup you seem to have 5 partitions on /dev/hdb and 1 15GB partition on /dev/hda. Is this a production machine? Maybe you have some hidden partitions on /dev/hdb. Have a look also in /etc/raidtab for some more info. I think your problem lies in the partitioning of the hardrives. I would start from scratch and use some disk partitioning software such as Disk druid, fdisk or Partition Magic on both of the drives and start again. There's some good info here #man mkraid and # /sbin/raidhotremove --help and #man raidtab. Unfortunately its a bit out of my league.

[Jon]

Thanks for the help. Would you suggest I make each drive one large partition (which I think may be the best, as one drive was new and one was in use allready. I'm starting to think this was the problem) or set up the three partitions they are suposed to have? I thought the program formats and partitions the drive during an install but they may have a bug in the software. On the experienced user forum several users have reported the same problem but there was no solution yet.

[Lloyd Keen]

Jon,
I would definately leave the drives as one big partition, e-smith will look after the rest.
Regards lloyd

[e-smith Technical Suppor]

We have a documented workaround to this problem on our Known Bugs page:

http://www.e-smith.org/bugs/index.php3?op=showBug&bugID=40

We have realized that the geometry on both disks must be the same for software RAID to work properly.

Thanks to Lophas for sending a report to bugs_AT_e-smith.com.