Partitioning issues

[Александр Деревянко]

Kövesdán Gábor wrote:

>Hello,
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>Thanks for Your answer.
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>>If you have raid 5 on 3 x 100-Gb drives you will only get 200Gb partition.
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>In fact, the total capacity is 320GB, I have three 160Gb Samsung sata drives.
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>>"not official"
>>Do you mean, that you burn the ISO from ftp server, or you have compose 
>>themself something ?
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>As for the cd, I downloaded the bult distributions from a Japanise mirror, the structure of the binaries was the same as the binaries on the official cd. I extracted the official cd and the boot sector, changed the old binaries with the newer, and I burned a new cd from the binaries and the original bootsector. I know, this is rather a foolish solution, but speeder then compiling the source on my old 800mhz machine, and it works fine on this computer. I'm using this stable now at home. It was necessary to make such a disc, because the release didn't boot on the server machine, I don't know why.
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>>Assuming you mean software raid, vinum:
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>No, I meant hardware raid, but I forgot to mention it, sorry.
>There's a 3ware 8056-4lp pci sata raid controller, and I checked, that the GENERIC kernel supports it.
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>>If you have hardware raid, please copy kernel messages detecting this 
>>device.
>>Does creating of smaller size partitions works ? Do you really tryes to 
>>install with smaller partition size ?
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>Unfortunately I don't know how to save that dmesg. I know, on an installed system I can find it in a file boot.dmesg or something like that, but in this case I don't have any idea.
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You can boot with serial console and save console output.

>I didn't try to install, because I didn't want to destroy the previous system. It is a Debian-sarge for amd64 but it isn't reliable enough, 
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I think, stable branch will not be much more reliable.

>thus I intend to install FreeBSD stable from that i386 disc or in any other way and then I'd like to upgrade via CVSup with an amd64 optimized code. I prefer FreeBSD to linuxes, I use it at home and I'm entirely appreciated with it apart from this trouble. And in the linux world there hasn't been a good distribution that entirely supports amd64 yet.
>By the way, NetBSD didn't boot like the FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, OpenBSD did boot, but didn't see my raid array.
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>Best wishes,
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>Gabor Kovesdan
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Hmm. Do you have a normal controller in this computer ? I think, it will 
be possible to do something like this:
1. Install RELEASE on small  spare HD (4-10 Gb will be enought). Use for 
installation some
common old non-server computer.
2. Upgrade it to stable.
3. Boot server from this HD, not from RAID.
4. Play with RAID, repartition it, format and move root, usr and all 
other onto RAID.

But i think it will not best solution to server. STABLE branch is for 
testing, not for real work.
It is not wise idea to use stable for production purposes.

Best regards,
Alexander