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openSUSE 11.1 and /boot on RAID 1

I tried yesterday to set up a home server with two disks in a RAID 1 array.

My intention was to have everything on the RAID volume, including /boot, so that if a disk crash, I still can boot on the second one.
That’s the way I think it should work anyway, despite the number of tutorials or forum posts advising not to do so.

The openSUSE partitionner, during the installation process, warned me that having /boot on the RAID 1 array may not work with grub.
And indeed, at the end of the installation, I could not be able to set grub properly :

  • the installer seemed to be lost, writing wrong devices in the various grub config file like menu.lst and grub.conf
  • I tried to use the manual edition mode offered by the installer, but either because I missed something or there is a bug somewhere, I could never save my modifications.

Conclusion : there was a no go.

I became curious to see how a few other distributions could handle it.

At first, I thought they would all fail, because I have always found the openSUSE installer to be the best out there.

So I took a Debian Lenny CD, which is my second favorite distribution, and looked at it. The Debian installer is straightforward, but the partionner has always lacked of flexibility. It is fine when you are doing something pretty standard, but you get quickly limited when you want to do something more complicated.
There, no way to have /boot on a RAID volume, and the interface was really painful to use. Any mistake almost oblige you for sure to restart all from scratch.

Then, I looked at Fedora 11… without expecting much. The last time I tried it on a machine, it just froze every time it read the disk configuration.
But… surprise ! All I wanted was supported out of the box. The partionner was as pleasant to use as the one of openSUSE, and setting grub on /dev/md0 was just a matter of checking a box.

I have been quite impressed this time and Fedora will stay on this machine for a while.

I haven’t tested openSUSE 11.2 yet because the purpose of this machine is to be a server, so I care about stability.

But I will, and I wish it can support this feature also, or that it will be the case some day.

Related posts:

  1. No Nessus gui client and limited support of the server for openSUSE
  2. Switching from Ubuntu to OpenSuse
  3. openSUSE 11.1
  4. Automatic backup when inserting a drive
  5. OpenSSL : CVE-2009-3555 security fix and mod_ssl client authentication breakage

JC :: Oct.21.2009 :: Admin, Linux, System, openSUSE :: 7 Comments »

7 Responses to “openSUSE 11.1 and /boot on RAID 1”

  1. on 21 Oct 2009 at 8:52 pm -- Bender

    You care about stability yet you have Fedora 11 installed as a server ;) ??

    Nuff said?

  2. on 21 Oct 2009 at 9:46 pm -- JC

    I expected such a comment… ;)
    I mean, it is a home server. Of course, in corporate environment, I would NEVER use Fedora…
    But still I guess Fedora, or at least its server components, is more stable than openSUSE 11.2, which hasn’t even been released yet.
    And talking about security, Fedora is rather good too.
    So as a home server, it will be fine.

  3. on 22 Oct 2009 at 11:00 am -- Michal

    This should work, grub just has to be installed in MBR (not sure if this was the case here, it would be good to report the issue in bugzilla.novell.com to get it fixed).

    There are some fixes in this area in openSUSE 11.2, even an option for redundancy — grub is installed on both disks, so you might give it a try.

  4. on 22 Oct 2009 at 11:45 am -- kokso

    Booting from software raid1 is not easy for configuration and openSUSE support only configuration where GRUB is installed to MBR. I am sure that 11.2 will be better than 11.1 in this case.

    Maybe good idea is write your problem also to bugzilla.novell.com and if you also attach yast logs you can help to solve the problem in installation or somebody write you any workaround for you.

    11.2 should support also redundancy for md array It means if your /boot partition is on raid1 and it is build from 2 physical partitions with same partition number (from 2 different disks) yast propose also using redundancy which can take care about problem if one of disk is off or broken(is not bootable).

  5. on 22 Oct 2009 at 12:29 pm -- JC

    Thank you for the info, I will try out 11.2 very soon.

  6. on 27 Oct 2009 at 8:56 pm -- Petr

    Problems with RAID1 are fixed in openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8

  7. on 13 Nov 2009 at 8:50 pm -- nessus reporting tools

    I have a similar site with lots of related information. Thanks for the post, Computers fascinate me. See it here:,

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