[ale] Compaq raid disk. How do I format?

[Jeff Hubbs]

I've just been through this with a similar machine (Proliant 1850R).  In
this particular unit's case, it needed the SmartStart CD (available for
$ from HP) because that's what was used on it last.  Otherwise, there's
some downloadable floppies that will work.  In any case - and I'm
working from memory here - you are right in that your RAID volumes
become /dev/ida/cXdY where X and Y are digits.  However, you run fdisk
on /dev/ida/cXdY/disc and create partitions that become
/dev/ida/cXdY/partZ where Z is the partition number.  

The 1850R is nominally a three-drive server.  Three drives, I've found,
is not a good number.  If you really want to have the R in RAID, you can
either make a RAID 5 out of all three drives or maybe you can make a
three-way RAID 1 (not very space-efficient).  The machine I recently
worked on was set up for a three-drive RAID 5 and I had no way to change
it.  If you access that one volume and give yourself a bare minimum of
three partitions within that, you have the distasteful situation where
your RAID 5 is handling simultaneous writes and reads during many
typical administrative operations and is also handling swap at the same
time.  That's a surefire way to have a sloggy server - I've seen it
happen a number of times.  

A server like this really needed an outboard array.  I have never liked
cutting up a RAID volume into partitions, but what I'd probably do with
a machine like this and an external array is use the three internal
drives for nothing but /boot and swap and put everything else on the
external, paying attention to parts of the filesystem that would be be
heavy-read and what would be heavy-write.  

This is one reason why I've lamented that with the growth of disk sized,
the market never produced hyper-speed 1GB and 2GB drives for things like
swap.  Yes, yes, I know about solid state drives, but you can't
rationally start speccing those out when you haven't yet maxed out your
RAM.

- Jeff



On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 20:15, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Get the SMART2 driver from HP/Compaq. They have it for download
> (somewhere). That will let the Linux system "see" a single drive if
> that's how the RAID adapter is configured. You will need to set up the
> drives in the boot-up SMART2 tool. It's one the F2, F4, F10, F12, <alt>-
> <something> access methods. Watch the screen.
> 
> The best thing would be a straight Linux software raid with the
> controller just adding the hardware interface. That make the drives
> portable.
> 
> On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 15:54 -0400, Jim Lynch wrote:
> > I've have an old compaq that a Windows tech added some disks to but had 
> > no idea what to do to make it work on Linux.  From the dmesg listing I 
> > found:
> > 
> > Compaq SMART2 Driver (v 2.4.5)
> > Found 1 controller(s)
> > cpqarray: Finding drives on ida0 (SMART-2/P)
> > cpqarray ida/c0d0: blksz=512 nr_blks=8380320
> > cpqarray ida/c0d1: blksz=512 nr_blks=16768800
> > cpqarray ida/c0d2: blksz=512 nr_blks=17764320
> > 
> > It looks like he added ida/c0d2 since I have the other two drives 
> > mentioned in the fstab file.  When I tried to look at one of the 
> > existing drives with fdisk I found:
> > Disk /dev/ida/c0d1: 1 heads, 16768800 sectors, 1 cylinders
> > Units = cylinders of 16768800 * 512 bytes
> > 
> >          Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/ida/c0d1p1   *         1         1   2044064   82  Linux swap
> > Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
> >      phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 0, 33)
> > Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
> >      phys=(500, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 4088160)
> > Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
> >      phys=(500, 254, 32) should be (500, 0, 16768800)
> > /dev/ida/c0d1p2             1         1    391680   83  Linux
> > Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
> >      phys=(501, 0, 1) logical=(0, 0, 4088161)
> > Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
> >      phys=(596, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 4871520)
> > Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
> >      phys=(596, 254, 32) should be (596, 0, 16768800)
> > /dev/ida/c0d1p3             1         1    261120   83  Linux
> > Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
> >      phys=(597, 0, 1) logical=(0, 0, 4871521)
> > Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
> >      phys=(660, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 5393760)
> > Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary:
> >      phys=(660, 254, 32) should be (660, 0, 16768800)
> > /dev/ida/c0d1p4             1         1   5687520    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> > Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
> >      phys=(661, 0, 1) logical=(0, 0, 5393761)
> > Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
> >      phys=(1023, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 16768800)
> > Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary:
> >      phys=(1023, 254, 32) should be (1023, 0, 16768800)
> > /dev/ida/c0d1p5             1         1   5687504   83  Linux
> > 
> > Which makes me a bit leary of using fdisk on these drives.  Most of that 
> > output doesn't make sense to me.  Can anyone point me in the right 
> > direction so I can learn how to format this new drive?  This is a RH 7.2 
> > system.  If I understand correctly this is a RAID system.  The new 
> > drive  is really 2 9 Gb drives configured as a mirror, so I was told.  
> > Is there some other utility I need to use to make sense of the 
> > partitioning of the existing drives?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Jim.
> > 
> > 
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