gmirror metadata

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 09:31 +0100, Michael Riexinger wrote:

> The strange thing is: When I labeled the second drive with gmirror and 
> rebooted the machine, the raid bios said something like 'new disk 
> detected' and rebooted automatically, and then it put it's own metatata 
> on it...

That's what I remember happening to me.  After attaching the drives and
starting up again, the RAID BIOS declared something about "new disk
detected."  Apparently, it also spammed over my geom_mirror metadata
with its own.  I guess, for some reason, it wanted to mark the drives as
"unused/unallocated" in any of its RAIDs, rather than taking the more
polite approach of denoting an *absence* of its chosen metadata to
indicate that fact.  (I wouldn't have minded so much if I'd explicitly
marked the drives as "spares" or similar, but I didn't want the RAID to
use them at all.  Like I said, its behaviour was all very rude.:)

The LSI MegaRAID IDE 100 card I was using does have an "EPROM
enable/disable" jumper on it to disable the RAID BIOS and make the card
revert (I guess) to a standard IDE controller.  However, in that mode, I
couldn't seem to boot from it.  That might have more to do with the
finicky Dell BIOS in my system, though... :-(

Cheers,

Paul.
-- 
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

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