Re: problem installing on RAID partition and hot to rescue

[Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu>]

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Hello!

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu> skribis:
>
>> I "manually" created a RAID 1 device /dev/md0 and used that device with
>> the "guided partitioning" method:
>
> What did you do exactly?

right before the partitioning phase in the installer, I switched to a
terminal console, partitioned the two physical disks [1] with cfdisk
with 1 partition each (/dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1) then assembled the RAID
1 device via mdadm, something like

   mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

then switched back to the installer and used /dev/md0 as the device for
"Guided partitioning": it worked well up until grub-install

> Did you modify /mnt/etc/config.scm once the graphical installer had
> displayed it?

ehrm... no :-S
I should have done this, as documented in the manual [2]

> And did you also re-partition and re-mount your disks accordingly?

no but I don't understand what's the rationale to re-partition (delete
and recreate partitions?) and re-mount the partitions ad this phase of
installation

> That sounds inconvenient and error-prone.  :-/

do you mean: it's inconvenient to manually edit /mnt/etc/config.scm once
the graphical installer displayed it and before the "guix system init
/mnt/etc/config.scm /mnt" by the installer?

thinking twice I realize that mix-and-match guided (installer) and
manual installation is not a great idea... it was a dirty hack :-)

by the way, I'll try to rescue the system from the unbootable state:
I'll re-assemble /dev/md0, chroot to it and try to grub-install and
re-init Guix system with a fixed config.scm

if the above fails, I'll re-install from scratch using the manual
installation method

>> last but not least: should we add a guided RAID<N> partitioning
>> method to the Graphical Installer?
>
> I guess we should!

I'd like to help with patches but I'm still not able to code in Guile
[3]... I can test it 10 times if that feature will be added :-)

Thanks! Gio'


[1] actually they are RAID 0 logical volumes created via the "smart
array" HP controller software: I was not able (it seems impossible) to
configure the controller for direct access of *physical* disks from the
OS (HP Smart Array P410 - I **hate** this)... but that's a completely
different story... or not?
https://serverfault.com/questions/29349/disabling-raid-feature-on-hp-smart-array-p400#41975

[2]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Mapped-Devices.html#Mapped-Devices

[3] configuring and packaging is easy but it's not the kind of coding we need


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-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures

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