Booting to root on gmirror with disk failure, is it even possible?

[Eric Crist]

On Sep 4, 2007, at 9:31 PMSep 4, 2007, Modulok wrote:

> Before I invest significantly more time into my current gmirror
> issues, I have but two simple questions for anyone out there:
>
> 1. Has anyone used gmirror for the root partition and been able to
> successfully boot with one failed (or un-plugged) disk? It's the
> latter part of the question that is the real issue for me. I'm just
> looking for a confirmed "it's possible".
>
> 2. If yes, what version of FreeBSD, what brand/model of hard disks,
> and what mainboard was used?
>

We have been using gmirror on some Dell systems for a while now, and  
we put it through it's paces before we deployed it to production.  We  
pulled drives while the system was running, rebooted, the works.

We found gmirror to be pretty fault tolerant and were not able to get  
it to fail.  If you pull your main drive, the system was always able  
to successfully boot from the second drive.  Rebuilding was always  
possible, as well.

Our tests were done on older Dell PowerEdge 1650's with Fujitsu SCSI  
drives.  I don't know specifically what model/manufacturer the  
motherboard is.

If there's any other questions, feel free to ask!
-----
Eric F Crist
Secure Computing Networks