[WBEL-users] Software RAID1 problems

[Matthew Hodgett]

I had a system installed and working fine, actually it is my lab for
experimenting with. I am now looking into RAID solutions and have been
looking at software RAID1. I found a set of procedures that seemed to
work, until I try bringing the system up. It then bombs out complaining
that the superblock is not consistent. I checked out dmesg and found it
was complaining about the hdc, the second disk.

After doing some testing I have found that I get a problem whenever I
put any partition on the second hard disk that is over 1024 cylinders,
even when not part of a RAID volume. Now, the two drivers are identical
10Gb WDs. When had is OK and hdc has no partitions all is OK. But when I
put that partition bigger than 1024 cylinders on hdc is always bombs.
Fdisk doesn't complain about it.

I did read that linux 2.4 treats had and hdb different to hdc and hdd.
The reference also says to try unsetting LBA in the BIOS, but this
doesn't work. I have also tried to manually set the cyl,hd,spt manually,
but no go. From the rescue disk the mirror comes up degraded. I am on
the last hope of a solution here, and am hoping there is an startup
option I can try that would get the disks treated the same and be able
to go beyond 1024 cylinders.

Matt