FreeBSD 8.0: RAID-1 using gpart, gvinum and gmirror

[Marin Atanasov]

Hello,

I'm going to make my partition mirrored using the geom utilities, but
however I've noticed that I cannot use the same way I used to do it under
7.2 and 8.0-RC1.

Here's the situation - I tried a lot of times to make my root partition
mirrored using gvinum, but each time when I boot in the new partition I'm
unable to boot from it.. So instead of using gvinum for the root partition
I've decided to use gmirror - and it works!

I did it the following way - two NOT identical disks are added to the
system.

  - 1 slices on the first disk
  - 2 slices on the second one (the 1st slice is the size of the root
partition which is on the 1st slice on the 1st disk)

Right after a fresh minimal install, I go to single-user mode and create the
mirror:

# gmirror label -vb round-robin gm0 /dev/ad0s1a

Installing bootstap code on the second disk (in case I need to boot later
from it):
# fdisk -BI /dev/ad4s1
# bsdlabel -wB /dev/ad4s1
# newfs -O2 /dev/ad4s1
# newfs -O2 -U /dev/ad4s2

And then inserting the second component of the mirror:
# gmirror insert gm0 /dev/ad4s1

And this is how I was doing a mirror for the root partition. For the other
partitions - /usr, /var, /tmp, swap I used gvinum following a different
articles, howtos and eventually it worked. The complete scenario of how I
did the mirror for the other partitions is here (sorry, it's too long to
just copy/paste it in the lists):
http://www.daemonforums.org/showpost.php?p=27010&postcount=3

If I can say it with little words - the way mirroring works for the other
partitions was to overlap all the other partitions with one big vinum
partition.

My problem now is that I cannot do this anymore, because I need to use gpart
instead for creating the partitions, and using gpart I cannot create a vinum
partition that will overlap the other partitions, so I cannot make any
mirror for the other partitions.

Is there any other way of doing this?

I'm out of ideas now, perhaps you could help me out with this :)

Thanks and regards,
Marin

-- 
Marin Atanasov Nikolov
dnaeon AT gmail DOT com
daemon AT unix-heaven DOT org