Linux Mint 17 - Setting up RAID 1?

[fanaudical]

I'm a complete Linux newbie. I know there are some Linux guru's here that have provided me some introductory info in the past. I'm hoping to tap into that.

I have an old Dell Precision 390 with 2 installed 500GB drives with a fresh install of Linux Mint 17 - 64bit. I struggled with install as this computer has an on-board RAID controller that is not recognized by Linux Mint 17; I eventually disabled the controller's config for RAID 1 and set it up as two separate drives (no RAID).

I understand that it is possible to set up software RAID using mdadm but have not found succinct instructions as to how to do this. I get very frustrated reading the Linux Mint forums as those are obviously not meant for the new guys. I have searched for a while with no luck.

Can anybody point me to a succinct instruction set for doing this?

Thanks for the help.

[Scott R]

I wouldn't want to do software RAID over just JBODS. Since mint is just an Ubuntu derivative have you tried a regular Ubuntu live cd to see if it detects the RAID driver?

You should be able to use the RHEL5 driver from Dell:

Product Support | Dell US

You will need to likely compile the dell driver into the distro, but that's half the fun.

[id10t]

Software RAID-1 for my /home partition in Mint no probs

On my phone will post more tonight from home

[fanaudical]

Thanks, guys!

I have tried the regular Ubuntu live CD - it doesn't recognize that controller either.

[widebody911]

My first question would be "Why that specific distro?"

[stomachmonkey]

Mint is a good newb distro so I don't question that.

You should be able to so the software raid using LVM

[fanaudical]

To answer Widebody's question:

This is a computer mostly for my wife (who incidentally manages to scramble all things Windows and incidentally hates Windows 7 and 8). I originally built her an old box that ran the Ubuntu distro and she was OK with that but complained that it wasn't more like Windows (go figure). I recently got another not-so-old-box and thought I would give her an upgrade (and hopefully end the complaining).

I was hoping that Mint would be similar to Ubuntu (drop in a live disk and be able to completely rebuild a machine in 30 minutes) but didn't expect the RAID issue.

While she is 90% of the reason I'm doing this, I would like to learn a bit about Linux in the process (but not ready to jump in the deep end).

[fanaudical]

I didn't find any obvious setup in LVM to set the RAID array (my understanding is that this must be set with MDADM). (I did try to use LVM via the installer but it did not see the single volume when the RAID controller was enabled.)

[stomachmonkey]

So it sounds like you are looking to create a fallback drive in case she borks the primary drive.

Instead of banging your head against the wall with RAID why not consider rsnapshot (rsync) which will give you full and incremental backups.

[id10t]

Now that I have a real keyboard

Typically software RAID has issues with install/config when it is used on the boot drive and/or / partition. You can make a small (few gigabytes) partition at the front of one drive as /boot, use the same space on the other for your swap partition. It is still hard to deal with during install, but Debian has an option for LVM/RAID during install - Mint just hides it since it is more focused on the desktop.

What I do is have a single 120gb SATA drive to boot from and use as / (it is /dev/sda w/ a root partition and a swap partition), and then 2 500gb SATA drives set up after boot as software RAID-1 and mount it as /home so all of my user files are RAID protected. Since I do a lot of web programming I also set up Apache to use /home/apache as its DocumentRoot so all of my PHP and such are on RAID as well.

Any of the tutorials for Debian, Ubuntu, or Mint for setting up mdadm after install will work for you. It is basically one command, set up a default config file, modify /etc/fstab, and let the drives synch. Note that you can copy data to it while the drives are synching.

[fanaudical]

Thanks for the info and ideas. I'll look at rsync and see if that looks workable. It does sound like the best option for what I'd like to do is add a third drive and use the others for data.