vinum problems

[Chris Smith]

Hi,

I've just built a machine with a vinum root successfully.  All vinum
sets show that they are up and working.  There are two ATA disks in a
RAID1 root formation.

Some questions?

1. The set has just failed completely (sorry it isn't up and working
now) on the first reboot.  It is possible to bring the machine up from
the primary disk with no problems but any attempt to start the mirror
drive causes a panic with a "hardware error" although checking it with
bsdlabel shows the partition table is intact.  Any ideas?  the drive is
fine - i've pulled it and tested it and it's fine.  It's booting using
BootMgr.

I've killed it completely now by reloading the vinum config twice.  so
it's out of action permanently. 

I did make sure that there was enough space at the start of the disk for
the vinum info to survive.

2. Speed.  The vinum set is a "concat" disk.  The read performance was
really slow (visibly so).  Can you boot off a striped volume and will it
benefit me at all making it a striped volume at all rather than a
concat?  

hardware:

SIL3112 SATA RAID controller.
2x 80Gb Seagate barracuda ATA disks (ad4, ad6)
FreeBSD-5.3-STABLE

config:

cant provide this - it won't boot any more.

Any ideas?  Or any good resources on setting up a RAID1 root disk???

Cheers,

- Chris.