Doesn't *anyone* (else) use an atacontrol-built software RAID1 (mirror)?

Andrew Reilly andrew-freebsd at areilly.bpc-users.org
Thu Sep 28 18:55:04 PDT 2006


Hi,

I've posted this sort of question to freebsd-questions and
freebsd-stable, back on the 22nd, when I first noticed a
problem.  Much to my surprise, I've not received any answer at
all, which makes me wonder if, perhaps, I'm the only one
actually using this sort of configuration.  If that's the case,
then I'll happily drop it like a hot rock and try again with a
GEOM mirror, or something like that.

Here's the story:

I just (a week ago) tried to do an in-place upgrade from
RELENG_5 to RELENG_6 on a system that was running an ataraid
(built with atacontrol) mirror on a pair of SATA disks.  The
root file system (256M) mounted fine, but fsck -p fails (unable
to find a superblock, from memory) under the new kernel on my
/usr partition, which is about 73G (most of the 80G of the
disks).  Falling back to the RELENG_5 /boot/kernel and fsck
finds no problem with that filesystem.

Is there a known behaviour change in ataraid behaviour between
the two versions?  The hardware is Intel P4, ICH6 SATA150, and a
pair of Seagate 80G SATA drives.  I can dig up more details if
necessary.  Full dmesg and config file details are included in
the message to freebsd-questions on the 22nd, entitled
"ataraid/fsck glitch on upgrade from 5.5 to 6-stable?"

One odd-looking thing that I noticed (in RELENG_5, of
course) is that fdisk ar0 says that cylinders=9729 heads=255
sectors/track=63, but fdisk ad4 (the first of the "real" SATA
disks) says cylinders=155061, heads=16, sectors/track=63.
Should these really be so different?  I haven't tested it, but
wouldn't this geometry difference make recovery with one dead
drive kind of awkward?

Is backup and start again from label/newfs (perhaps using
gmirror instead of atacontrol?) my only option?

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew


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