RAID for what now?

[Anonymous]

So My plan with installing Panther Server on my old B&W G3 was to RAID the 2 9 GB drives on the 2940W card and create a nice fast system drive, with a cron nightly backup to a ATA drive. But I guess that unless you shell out the bucks for an Xserve, you can’t startup off of a RAID created with Disk Utility… That’s frustrating for me, especially since this is all Apple OEM gear… But the 4 port NIC does show up nicely…

So is there a hack to enable booting off of a RAID in these machines (non-Xserve)? If not, what would all of you server mavens recommend that I use these nice LVD SCSI drives for? My last lonely slot in this machine is going to pick up my Ahard ATA card and my drives from my old beige box, so I have lots of HD space, and expansion room….

Theoretically I could put 2 drives on the (empty) motherboard ATA bus, 2 each on the 2 ATA busses on my Ahard card, and the 2 that are on the SCSI card….I could even probably cram one onto the IDE bus (No ZIP)…. 9 drives…. Would I run out of power or space first? But that’s just a theory.

But what would you recommend? It’s sitting by my desk now, not online yet, so I can do anything with it. Panther Server is running on it, and nicely. I’m about to go get the updates running on it… But I can always reinstall if the drive rearrangement justifies it…

Thanks in advance.

[hetjan]

If all else fails you could buy a _real_ SCSI RAID card…

[Anonymous]

So how can I get it to boot from the RAID? I RAIDed my two Cheetahs striped, and installed Panther Server. Installs the first disk without a problem. When it spits the first disk out and restarts, it gives me the flashing question mark, then finally boots off the Installer CD. If I take the installer CD away from it, it just sits and waits.

So, OK, I can’t boot it on a striped RAID. So I tried mirrored. Exact same story. Installs without a problem, no warnings, nothing till it tries to reboot.

As soon as i delete the RAID set, I can install it on either drive from the set, and it boots flawlessly. I installed the server on one drive, and the client on the other. Then just for fun installed the server over the client. Is there any benefit to doing this? I mean I could run the Server on my laptop too, but I don’t really see any benefit from it.

Am I missing something in my RAID setup? Would a third party RAID software be better? I know that a hardware RAID card would fix the problem, but then I have to buy a pair of drives to go with it (my ATA drives aren’t matched at all) and I’m trying to do this on the cheap. Suggestions?

[roadshowpro]

So, I’m still working on this, and since I’m bored, I’m working harder…. Client won’t install on my RAID at all. It gets to the checking disk stage, and gives me a vague error that something failed. Then it reboots back to the installation CD so I can start it all over again…

Off to try Panther Server again…. It’s past the disk check stage and is installing the Base System Part 2 whatever that is… If it doesn’t boot this time, I’ll see what happens with client if I skip the disk check….

—EDIT—

SO you can skip the check disk section in the client install, and it installs without any erroes, but it again, won’t boot from a RAIDed volume. I know there’s a way… Well, I think there’s a way. I just don’t know it yet…

[hetjan]

[url=www.softraid.com]SoftRAID[/url] notes the ability to start up from a mirrored volume as “Coming Soon”…

[roadshowpro]

So I was bored and I dug out my Jaguar server install disk and tried that on the RAID. No change, it still doesn’t boot from the RAID. But in my snooping around, I did discover that both installers were setting the drive to “Ignore Permissions on this Volume” And that’s never good for the boot drive. But unchecking that and repairing permissions didn’t help me boot from the RAID either.

Off to try something new…. I dunno what yet, but something new…
😯

[Author]

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