Disk Recovery Part III

[blu at scrunch.net (Bob BLU)]

This thread has run on so long I just had to add to it! ;-)

My thoughts:

Skip LVM for your simple home/office machine, not worth the trouble.
Put your two disks on separate IDE cables.
Create three matching partitions on each disk and raid mirror them.
Mount the raid devices on /boot, swap, /.
Make boot 128MB to 512MB.
Make swap 1GB to 4GB.
Make root the rest.
Buy a tape backup unit and use it.

If you use a current RedHat or Fedora (and surely others) there is a graphical install tool that makes this all a snap.

If you are building a server or workstation with specific business requirements then these simple thoughts need not apply.

# mount -t ext3
/dev/md0 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
/dev/md2 on /     type ext3 (rw)

# df -h -t ext3
Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0    251M   43M  196M  18% /boot
/dev/md2    180G   59G  112G  35% /

# lsraid -p
[dev   9,   0] /dev/md0   ... online
[dev   8,   1] /dev/sda1  ... good
[dev   8,  17] /dev/sdb1  ... good

[dev   9,   1] /dev/md1   ... online
[dev   8,   2] /dev/sda2  ... good
[dev   8,  18] /dev/sdb2  ... good

[dev   9,   2] /dev/md2   ... online
[dev   8,   3] /dev/sda3  ... good
[dev   8,  19] /dev/sdb3  ... good

# cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
      264960 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
      4192896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0]
      190900288 blocks [2/2] [UU]