Atacontrol software RAID

Norberto Meijome freebsd at meijome.net
Mon Sep 19 07:08:02 PDT 2005


Hi all,
I've been trying to build a 2 disk mirror with atacontrol on a standard 
IDE controller (testing in vmware), from an already running 4.11 system.

ad0 has the system, ad3 is the new drive. I thought I should be able to 
mimic the gmirror trick of making a  1 disk degraded mirror on ad3, move 
everything over to the raid, wipe ad0 and add it to the mirror.....

# atacontrol create RAID1 ad3
fails. needs @ least 2 disks....so

#atacontrol created RAID1 ad3 ad3
did the trick ;) - after a reboot it became :

ar0: WARNING - mirror lost
ar0: 6143MB <ATA RAID1 array> [783/255/63] status: DEGRADED subdisks:
 0 DOWN
 1 READY ad3: 6143MB <VMware Virtual IDE Hard Drive> [12483/16/63] at 
ata1-slave UDMA33

and I could use ar0 as i'd expect it to (could boot off it, moved all 
the data from ad0 to ar0, mounted all partitions from it,etc).

The problem happened when I tried to add ad0 to the mirror...i couldn't 
find a way to do it. atacontrol addspare is not available in 4.x systems...

Any suggestions on how to get ad0 to be part of ar0? Upgrading to 5.x 
may be an option, but then i'd be using gmirror anyway :-)

thanks in advance,
Beto


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list