[mythtv-users] HELP! I want my mythtv!

[Simon Hobson]

Hika van den Hoven <hikavdh at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had ones a fake failure on one of my raid1 arrays. Checking the
> drive showed nothing and after re-adding it is still running for more
> then a year.

I have a system at work like that - an old Dell rackmount server with SCSI drives. Every now and then it'll spit it's dummy out and declare one or more drives as failed. Then I have the fun of forcing the arrays back together again and it'll run fine for ${random_long_period}.



Joseph DeGraw <coffee412 at comcast.net> wrote:

> But I got the new drive in and reconstructed a new raid and things are now running good.

You're actually better off not using RAID for this application, both for performance and for resilience.

Performance wise, you are better off with two separate drives. Add both into Myth and it will load-share between them.
Resiliency wise, as you've found, a striped set will lose you all your data when any drive in the array fails. Keep them as separate drives and you only lose the data on that drive.

> Well, I think the point that did apply to my situation is that when you have a failing raid that is not part of the actual operating system (i.e. its a data array only) the operating system should still be able to boot with a failed raid. Not being able to boot the operating system puts you in a bad situation in that you have to jump thru alot more hoops to get things fixed.

It should be possible to fix it from the Busybox prompt - it'll just be harder to do. The point of dropping to the Busybox prompt is to give you at least some basic tools with which to fix the system - which is better than most other systems I've used which "just fail" and leave you with nothing (not fun when it's a system the whole company relies on !) From there, you should be able to mount your root volume (even if not as /) and get access to the various tools you need. Sometimes, speaking from experience, it's just a matter of fscking a filesystem that needs a little fixing more than the automatic flags will do at boot time.