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

[Jacques Marneweck]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 11:53:52AM +1000, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> Hi,

Hi,

I normally would reinstall a machine from scratch rather than having a mission
to upgrade from one major release to another major release.

Also the software pseudo raid behaves quite well from my usage of it in
production environments.

Regards
--jm
> 
> 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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