Booting from software RAID

[Steve3]

Hi all,

I have my Intel Xserve quad core with 2 80 gig drives, each partitioned into 2 38 gig partitions.
I’ve taken a partition from each, used Disk Utility, and mirrored these, and have used them as my boot volume since Leopard was released.
I use SuperDuper to clone into the other partitions and use them as backup bootable OS’s.

This week, I had some trouble with my Boot_RAID filling up with files (which seems to be fixed by blocking port 25 on my firewall, even though my allowed networks were limited to the local subnet, but whatever), and after restarting, AFP wouldn’t allow any logins. I selected my Clone1 partition to boot from, and the server was back up.

Over the weekend, I re-cloned from the Clone1 back to Boot_RAID, and selected Boot_RAID as the startup volume. Upon restart, it hung on the grey screen with the slightly darker grey circle-slash indicating “no”.

I rebooted again holding Option, and instead of 3 volumes, I had 4:
Clone1
Clone2
Boot_RAID1
Boot_RAID2

I rebooted from Clone1, and it’s running, though I’m obviously missing my hardware redundancy.

When I ask the server about the RAID, I get the following:

xx:~ administrator$ diskutil checkRAID
RAID SETS
———
===============================================================================
Name: Boot_RAID
Unique ID: 48B28D75-C220-4B10-AC4F-FEB4B92ED1BA
Type: Mirror
Status: Online
Size: 40847900672 B
Rebuild: automatic
Device Node: disk4
Apple RAID Version: 2
——————————————————————————-
# Device Node UUID Status
——————————————————————————-
0 disk2s2 DCB8070E-1AE0-42D3-BD71-DBBF8F823A3F Online
1 disk3s2 9A998C3B-3685-4F7E-9CCE-301ECEED3E71 Online
===============================================================================

And Disk Utility looks just like it should.

diskutil list shows the following:

/dev/disk4
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Boot_RAID *38.0 Gi disk4

I see that other bootable partitions have more slices:
/dev/disk3
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *76.3 Gi disk3
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk3s1
2: Apple_RAID 38.0 Gi disk3s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 128.0 Mi disk3s3
4: Apple_HFS Clone1 37.8 Gi disk3s4

Should a software RAID volume have an Apple_Boot volume? Did my clone back somehow alter my RAID volume structure in a way that Disk Utility doesn’t recognize?

Thanks,
Steve.

[Steve3]

Oh. This is interesting.

Instead of rebooting, I chose shut down this time (after selecting Boot_RAID in the Startup prefpane).

It paused for a while on “updating boot caches”, then when I restarted, everything is well.

Curious.

[Author]

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