Hi, This is related to my thread from a few days ago about the disappointing speed of my RAID6 root partition. The goal here is to get the machine booting from an SSD so that I can free up my five hard drives to play with.
SHORT SUMMATION: I've tried noninitrd and noraid in the kernel line of grub.conf but I keep booting from old RAID instead of the new SSD. What am I doing wrong? What I've done so far: 1) I've removed everything relatively non-essential from the HDD-based RAID6. It's still a lot of data (40GB) but my Windows VMs are moved to an external USB drive as is all the video content which is on a second USB drive so the remaining size is pretty manageable. 2) In looking around for ways to get / copied to the SDD I ran across this Arch Linux page called "Full System Backup with rsync": https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Full_System_Backup_with_rsync Basically it boiled down to just a straight-forward rsync command, but what I liked about the description what that it can be done on a live system. The command in the page is rsync -aAXv /* /path/to/backup/folder --exclude={/dev/*,/proc/*,/sys/*,/tmp/*,/run/*,/mnt/*,/media/*,/lost+found} which I have modified to rsync -avx /* /path/to/backup/folder --exclude={/dev/*,/proc/*,/sys/*,/tmp/*,/run/*,/mnt/*,/media/*,/lost+found} because I don't use (AFAICT) any of the ACL stuff and the command simply wouldn't do anything. I ran this command the first time to get 98% of everything copied while in KDE, but before I moved forward I exited KDE, stopped X and ran it as root from the console. After the second run it didn't pick up any new file changes so I suspect it's pretty close to what I'd get dealing with a Live CD boot. (COMMENTS?) 3) I added a new boot options in grub.conf: title fastVM 3.8.13-gentoo using LABEL (SSD, initramfs in kernel) root (hd5,0) kernel (hd0,0)/boot/bzImage-3.8.13-gentoo root=LABEL=fastVM video=vesafb vga=0x307title fastVM 3.8.13-gentoo using LABEL (SSD, initramfs in kernel) root (hd5,0) kernel (hd0,0)/boot/bzImage-3.8.13-gentoo root=/dev/sda1 video=vesafb vga=0x307 I am relatively confident that (hd5,0) is the SSD. I have 6 drives in the system - the 5 HDDs and the SSD. The 5 hard drives all have multiple partitions which is what grub tells me using tab completion for the line root(hdX, Additionally the SDD has a single partition to tab completion on root(hd5 finishes with root(hd5,0). I used /dev/sda as that's how it's identified when I boot using RAID. Now, the kernel has the initrd built into it so if it cannot be turned off I guess I'll try building a new kernel without it. However I found a few web pages that also said RAID could be disabled using a 'noraid' option which I thought should stop the system from finding the exiting RAID6 but no luck. Does anyone here have any ideas? fdisk info follows at the end. Ask for anything else you want to see. If I can get to booting off the SSD then for the next few days I could build different RAIDs and do some performance testing. Thanks, Mark c2RAID6 ~ # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 128.0 GB, 128035676160 bytes, 250069680 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xfd2e963c Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 250069679 125033816 83 Linux Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x8b45be24 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 63 112454 56196 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 112455 8514449 4200997+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb3 8594775 976773167 484089196+ fd Linux raid autodetect Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x703d11ba Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 * 63 112454 56196 83 Linux /dev/sdc2 112455 8514449 4200997+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdc3 8594775 976773167 484089196+ fd Linux raid autodetect Disk /dev/sde: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xce92d9ff Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sde1 2048 8594774 4296363+ 83 Linux /dev/sde3 8594775 976773167 484089196+ fd Linux raid autodetect Disk /dev/sdf: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x21141305 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdf1 2048 8594774 4296363+ 83 Linux /dev/sdf3 8595456 976773167 484088856 fd Linux raid autodetect Disk /dev/sdd: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xfb3ad342 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 * 63 112454 56196 83 Linux /dev/sdd2 112455 8514449 4200997+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdd3 8594775 976773167 484089196+ fd Linux raid autodetect Disk /dev/md3: 1487.1 GB, 1487118827520 bytes, 2904528960 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 16384 bytes / 49152 bytes c2RAID6 ~ #
