Re: raid0 disappears

[Patrick Welche <prlw1%cam.ac.uk@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2019 at 01:55:56PM +0300, pierre-philipp braun wrote:
> Hello Patrick,

Hello Pierre - thanks for taking a look!

> your problem is either badly explained or too complicated, or both.

I am reaching the conclusion that it must be "bad disks".

> You say you do not see raid0 when using netboot, and then it seems the same
> happens when booting from the disk.

Correct.

> I suppose there's something wrong about partitioning, either with MBR or
> labels.  Not sure there is something specific in that regard, compared
> to non-booting arrays.  But the relying and unused EFI partition makes
> the whole thing a bit far fetched.  Unless you really want EFI, just a
> big NetBSD partition as with `fdisk -0ua /dev/rwd0d`.

If there were something wrong the MBR or the labels, I wouldn't be able
to boot the kernel from raid0a.

> just in case, even though dmesg does not show it, you could check that
> /dev/rraid0 /dev/raid0 are truly absent.

They are truly absent in the sense of ioctls fail. After the raidctl -c
(and no further initialisation), raid0 is fine, i.e., the behaviour
is exactly as if I hadn't set the raid to autoconfigure.

[The need for netboot to illustrate is that no root filesystem is
found on normal boot]

>  Also I donno about `2 0` as
> array setting.  I do `1 2 0` for RAID-1 as explained in the manual.

The initial '1' was redundant and has been removed in the newer syntax.

Since then I booted that box with Seatools. Both disks passed the long
test. dmesg doesn't contain "can't read blk ..." errors. I notice sometimes
delays in writes and an associated unwelcome "thunk" from the disks, so
I will shelve this as unprovable disk hardware issue (unsatisfactory).


Cheers,

Patrick