How Do You Setup Asus M2N-MX SE RAID 1 Without Floppy Drive
Apr 15, 2008
I recently build a server with Asus M2N-MX SE motherboard and SuperMicro 14" mini 1u. On the back of the Asus M2N-MX SE manual. it said for RAID driver, i need to create it from the included CD and use a floppy disk. my question is how can i do it without a floppy disk? i have an external DVD-burner that i hook up to usb to install the OS. Is it possible to use a cd to install the driver when i press f6 during Windows2003 installation?
Is it worth the effort to setup RAID 1? I have two Maxtor 500GB SATA disks and using RAID 1 seem to reduce one disk and leave me with 500GB worth of space and is the onboard Nvidia RAID trust worthy? because it said due to chipset limitation, the SATA ports supported by the Nvidia chipset doesn't support Serial Optical disk drives (Serial ODD).
I am currently in the process of upgrading my web/mysql server due to heavy loads and io waits and have some questions. I am trying to be cost efficient but at the same time do not want to purchase something that will be either inadequate or difficult to upgrade in the future. I hope you can provide me with some guidance.
This server is a Centos Linux box, running both apache and mysql. The current usage on the box is:
Mysql Stats:
50 mysql queries per second With a ratio of read to write of 2:1 Reads are about 65 MB per hour and writes are around 32 MB per hour.
Apache stats:
35 requests per sec
The two issues that I am unsure of are:
- Whether or not i should go with Raid-1 or Raid-5
- Whether or not I should use Sata Raptor drives or SAS drives.
In either configuration I will use a dedicated Raid controller. If I went with SATA, it would be a 3ware 9650SE-4LPML card. If I went with SAS, I was looking at the Adaptec 3405 controller.
Originally, I was going to use 3 x 74GB Seagate Cheetah 15.4K SAS drives in a Raid-5 config. After more reading, I learned that raid-5 has a high write overhead. Though read is definitely more important based on my stats, I don't want to lose performance in my writes either. With this in mind, I looked into doing Raid-1 instead.
I came up with these choices:
- Raid-1 - 2 x Seagate ST373455SS Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SAS. HDs & controller costs are $940.
- Raid-1 - 2 x WD Raptor 74GB 10K SATA 150. HDs & controller costs are $652.
- Raid-5 - 3 x Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 ST336754SS 36.7GB. HDs & controller costs are $869.
- Raid-5 - 3 x WD Raptor 36GB 10K SATA 150. HDs & controller costs are $631.
As you can see we are not looking at huge differences in price, so I would be up for any of these options if I could just determine which would give me the best performance. I also know that I should have a 4th hotspare drive, but will buy that later down the road to ease cash flow in the beginning. If I went the SATA route, I would buy the 4th immediately.
From what I can tell, both configs provide the same redundancy, but are there any major performance considerations I should take? From what I have read, scsi/sas can enable database applications to perform better do to a lot of small and random reads and writes?
I know this isn't really hosting related, but WHT has always given the best answers to questions.
Right here goes...
I have a new 1U server, which I ordered with no CD drive, as I have a little USB external DVD/CD which I would normally load the OS on.
However I have LOST IT !!!!
So I have been crawling the net for ways to install Windows XP (im just using XP for a very short time for testing!) from either a USB stick or by taking the hard drive out of the server, and copying the CD content onto it from a working windows computer.
I am in a somewhat complicated situation... I wanted to order a custom server with hardware 3Ware RAID controller but after over a month of waiting I was told the HW RAID controller, as well as any other 3Ware controller they tried, does not work with the motherboard used in the server from Fujitsu-Siemens and that they simply got a reply from FS that the controller is not certified to work with their motherboard.
So although I'd prefer a HW raid, I am forced to either choose a different webhost or setup a software RAID. The problem is, I haven't done that before and am somewhat moderately...scared
I have read a lot of the info about SW RAID on Linux that I could find through Google but there are some questions unanswered still. So I thought that perhaps some of the more knowledgeable WHT members could help me with this problem...
The server specs will be:
Core2Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz), 2GB RAM, 6-8x* 250GB SATA II HDDs, CentOS 4.4 or SuSe, DirectAdmin
* I prefer 8 HDDs (or actually 9) over 6 but I am not sure if their server chassis can hold that many HDDs, I am awaiting answer from them. They don't have any other drives beside the 250GB ones so I am limited to those.
The preferred SW RAID setup is to have everything in RAID 10, except for the /boot partition which has to be on RAID-1 or no RAID I believe, plus one drive as hot spare (that would be the 9th drive). I am quite sure they will not do the setup for me but will give me access to KVM over IP and a Linux image preinstalled on the first HDD so that I'll have a functional system that needs to be upgraded to RAID-10.
How do I do that? The big problem I see is that LILO or GRUB can't boot from a software RAID-5/10 so I will have to mount the /boot partition elsewhere. It's probably terribly simple...if you have done it before which I have not. I have read some articles on how to setup a RAID-5/10 with mdadm (e.g. [url] ) but they usually do not talk about how to setup the boot partition. Should it be setup as a small sized (100-200MB) RAID-1 partition spread over all of the drives in the otherwise RAID-10 array?
What about swap? Should I create a 4-8GB (I plan to upgrade the server RAM to 4GB in near future) RAID-1 swap partition on each of the disks or swap to a file on the main RAID-10 partitions. The second sounds simpler but what about performance? Is swapping to a file on RAID-10 array a bad idea, performance wise?
Is it possible to grow a RAID-10 array in a way similar to growing a RAID-5 array with mdadm (using two extra drives instead of one of course)? mdadm doesn't actually even mention RAID-10 despite it does support it without having to create RAID-0 on top of RAID-1 pairs if the support is in kernel, from what I know.
We are limited with a maximum of 2 drives per server, with a maximum of 750gb drives.
We are thinking of going with 2 500gb hard drives. However the question is, should we use the Secondary drive with Raid 1 and let our VPS clients worry about their own backups or should we instead just use the secondary drive as a backup drive and backup each VPS nightly?
My raid 1 failed and it wouldn't be such an issue except that the other drive wasn't syncing for 2 months for some reason.
So now I have to try to recover it to get the info.
It seems that the drive seems to be ok yet I am unable to boot to it.
Using supergrub I was able to boot to a kernel but when it starts loading there is a kernel panic.
Error is basically
EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock mount:error 22 mounting ext3
When I use Rescue option using a centos CD, I am unable to mount the HD.
Using Knoppix,I was able to see the HD but unable to mount it since it claims the 2nd partition is no clean. Since the HD was raid, I don't think thats the problem at all.
Is there anything you guys can advise me? I'm somewhat new to doing this and really green on Raid for that matter.
I've software RAID installed with one SATA and one ATA/IDE drive. It is a combined controller so I had to add noprobe=/dev/hdc to the kernel boot line. Now the disks are named /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. There are four partitions, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 are the /dev/md0 root partition and then /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2 are the swap partition.
First when I removed one drive I just came to the grub command line..
Then I tried to do this in grub to make both drives bootable: grub>device (hd0) /dev/sda grub>root (hd0,0) grub>setup (hd0) grub>device (hd1) /dev/sdb grub>root (hd1,0) grub>setup (hd1) grub>quit
Now it looks like normal when I get to grub apart from that the background of the boot screen is black instead of blue and then the computer just restarts when it is supposed to start/boot the system.
If I use say two SAS 36gig 15k rpm drives 16mb cache - identical specs but different drive manufacturer's / models, do you guys think I would run into anything wierd? I've never really tried it. Is matching absolutely required? Never know..I doubt seek times different by a millisecond would cause issues but I just want to check.
Planning to buy a server from softlayer, adding a single 300gb 15k scsi drive costs 100$/month and adding 4 250gb sata drives with raid-10 costs 90$/month
If there is a failed drive in RAID-1 running on Dell 2850, FreeBSD 5.4, can I just take out the failed drive and replace it with a new one, while the server is running? Will FreeBSD cope & rebuild the drive on the fly?
We're building a bunch of new servers (as I mentioned in another thread). What do you guys think is the best drive layout? Traditionally we just have the entire 4-6 drives in a RAID 5, but now I'm wondering if it makes sense to have a separate OS drive, and then the rest in a raid 5?
On a side note, we need a giant ~2TB-3TB partition on these boxes, that's why we go with the multi-drive raid setup. Thoughts? I know it was customary to have a separate OS drive back in the day (I remember having WD raptor's for that), but now when the WD Black-edition (which we'll be using for the raid setup) are as fast as the raptor's, is it even worth it?
We have a client that has a mail server with two drives. One hard disk is devoted for OS/Application (C and one is devoted for mail storage only (D
The goal is to make the D: drive which is a SATA 320GB drive to be made into a mirror, i.e. add another drive and a RAID Card and make D has a RAID Mirror drive.
My understanding is that when a RAID is configured for drives, the drive will lose whatever data it has on it ? Is there no other way to construct a singular environment into a RAID mirror environment (by adding a drive and Card) without losing drive on one of the primary drives?
I have 2x250gb drives, and this is my output of fdisk -l:
Quote:
Disk /dev/hda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux /dev/hda2 14 30401 244091610 8e Linux LVM
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 30401 244196001 8e Linux LVM
I see the LVM is some sort of manager and it looks like the 2 drives are indeed set up as LVM, but I can't really tell what the means or how they are set up.
I'm looking to have them in a RAID-1 setup - a copy across drives so that it will continue working even if a drive fails.
we've got our new machine up and running smoothly. It's a core2duo running CentOS with Plesk 8.3. We have 2 drives in a RAID 1 configuration for reliability sake, and I'm looking for something to help me monitor the status of the disks in the array. Since RAID is pretty useless unless you know if one of the disks has died.
Is there some open source utility that will monitor this and email me if something is wrong? Perhaps something with a nice web interface?
Even better... is there some addon to plesk that will help with this?
I have a question regarding, hard drives and performance etc... I only use it for forums and currently is only one site (hopefully couple more in no time)
Currently I have 2x36gb SAS in raid 1 obviously containing everything including dbs and /home. and a third 250gb drive for backups only ^^ Ronny did an excelent job setting this up.
Any ways, my problem is that I wan't to allow some attachments on my forums, and this would take a significant ammount of space over 1gb no problem and then keep increasing (that's gonna sux for bandwidth). I know it will fit in the SAS drives no problems, dbs are rather small at the time (2.5gb in total) but logs are quite big 5-10gbs in total.
I thought it might be a good idea to purchase another drive. This 4th drive would be 750 and backups would move there , and use the 250 for the /home directory. This would give a lot of room for uploads, and backups accordingly and keep the fast ones for OS and dbs
I was told, however, and understandebly, that a lot of performance would be lost by moving /home to a SATA drive I know SATAS are no way as fast, but then vbulletin can't upload attach files to a folder outside its hirachy (without complicated modifications). (Note: i didn't specify my resons for wanting such set up)
So I'm in a bit of a pickle. Having the bigger drive would allow me to have the attachments, and should eventually result on more traffic etc to my site. /home currently is only 150mbs big... but then performance is also an issue pitty i couldn't afford the bigger drices at the time [sees the point of renting over buydowns now]
is there a way that /var/log/httpd saves those massive logs on another drive? it would free up 5-10gbs
in shortIs moving /home to a SATA drive from Raid 1 SAS a bad idea? (considering space and purpose)
Could httpd logs or /var/log in general be moved to the backup/another drive?
I have a Red Hat 8 server with RAID 1 setup and now I need more HD space.
I managed to replace both 40 gb disks on the raid array with 200 gb disks and the system stayed perfectly alive, BUT I still have only 40 gb of space available (and 160 gb of space somewhere hiding).
Is there a method on Red Hat 8 to get the rest of the disk in use?
At first I replaced another 40 gb disk with a new (empty) 200 gb disk and then on the raid setup I mirrored the old disk with the new disk. After that I replaced that another old 40 gb disk with a new 200 gb disk and did the mirroring again. Got both new 200 gb disks working on the RAID 1 array, except that little problem with space available on Red Hat 8..
I'm about to purchase a 2nd server to be used as a database/app server alongside my current server (of which will be the web server).
I wish to use 2 x 146GB 10K SCSI hard disks (in RAID 1) on the database server, but will be keeping 2 x 320GB SATAII 16M in RAID 1 on the web server. Will the SATA hard disks affect the performance / effectiveness of the SCSI disks or will I benefit from SCSI even though they're only in the database server?
Also, I'm going for 10K hard disks over 15K because they $20 per month cheaper and it's already expensive ($150 p/m for the two 10K or $170 p/m for 2 x 15k). Taking into account the already hefty price, is it worth the extra for 15K?
Not sure if this is too specific for this forum or not, but since I've gotten great advice here in the past I'll give it a shot.
I have a colo'd production server with a 3ware 9500S-12 RAID card and 12 400GB drives attached. The drives form 3 arrays:
1) 2 drive RAID 1 (400GB)
2) 2 drive RAID 1 (400GB)
3) 6 drive RAID 5 (2TB)
plus 2 global hot spares.
For a variety of reasons I need to change this setup so that array 1) and 2) remain as is, and array 3) is removed and those 6 drives replaced with 6 new 750GB drives in JBOD mode. I've copied all the data from the RAID5 array number 3) onto 3 of the new 750 drives (the 2TB array wasn't completely full,) and I have 3 other blank 750GB drives.
What's the best / safest way to do this? Ideally I'd like to remove the 6 old 400GB drives and retain the ability to plug them all back in and get my old array back (if something goes horribly wrong doing the switch.)
Do I need to reboot into 3BM (3ware Bios Manager) to do this, or can I do it from the command line?
Is there any problem with having a drive that already contains data written to it by another system, and bringing it up on the 3ware card in JBOD mode with the data intact? (All filesystems are ext3.) I'm not going to have to reformat the drive, am I?
Is there any problem with the new drives being SATAII (Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB) but the old drives (and I think the 3ware card, and certainly my motherboard) being SATAI? I've read that this should "just work" but of course I am nervous! There are no jumpers I can see on the 750GB drives.
Will it be possible to remove the RAID 5 in such a way that I could plug the drives back in and get the array back?
Not sure if I labeled that correctly, but I am looking to setup a multi-server where I offer a cloud ssd hosting plan, and sata hosting plan. The current setup has ssd hosting, but id like to add another ip address, as well as its hard drive to host other websites on that specific server, which is sata based.
For example, I add a domain to my plesk 12 admin account and choose the added Ip address (the sata based one), where it points to that server to access the files for that specific website.
At the moment, cloudflare handles all of my dns settings.. but I am totally lost on how this needs to be setup and if I am required to purchase another plesk license. I am trying to avoid purchasing another plesk license and having to setup a whole new plesk installation just to do this.. This is a vps by the way, not a dedicated server...
I've taken the scalable approach when it comes to servers for my various sites. With shared servers, I never really worried about backup or even hard drives going down. Same goes for VPS. For some reason, when I moved to dedicated servers, I outfitted them with 74GB SATA drives in a RAID setup. My understanding is that it protects me if one drive happens to fail. I've been lucky and haven't had that problem.
I'm at the point now where I'm looking to upgrade from a VPS paying around $75 per month to a dedicated server. I can stand to be down a day if a hard drive goes, if it means $75 a month in savings. My biggest concern would be suggestions on the best way to protect myself in the event of a catastrophe.
Contacted SoftLayer about possibly adding a second server for me and honoring the price I'm paying on my old server.
Finally, both the old and new site are seeing roughly 3,000 visits per day. The server I'm considering is a Clovertown 5320 1.86 dual quadcore, 4GB RAM, RAID, 2 74GB Cheetah drives,100mbps, 2000GB bandwidth. Is this overkill or the right server for the job?
Today we are going to conduct a detailed study of RAIDability of contemporary 400GB hard drives on a new level. We will take two "professional" drives from Seagate and Western Digital and four ordinary "desktop" drives for our investigation. The detailed performance analysis and some useful hints on building RAID arrays are in our new detailed article.
Apparently on of my colo customers sent the server without the OS or CD drive, and wants us to install CentOS 4.4 64 bit.
Any way to get "download" version of it, put it on a floppy, put it in the server and let the server download the rest from the internet (after we enter the IP info, so it can connect)?
I downloaded the Nvidia Chipset Driver Program v65.3.3 for Windows 2000/XP from Asus website and install on the Win2k3 R2 Standard edition and also the aduio driver. After driver update, there is a unknow device show in the Device manager.
I have an ASUS P5VD2-VM motherboard here, and i'm pretty sure i've narrowed it down to being the problem. Let me give you some background to start off with..
I've tried installing: FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE-i386 (with p4 chip), aswell as 6.2 FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE-amd64 (with Pentium D 820), aswell as 6.2 XP Professional SP2 (with p4 chip)
All three installations invoke a hard-reboot (FreeBSD- last thing I see is hard drive information related...XP- Right after the EULA, to continue to hard drive partitioning).
I changed the chip from an Intel Pentium D 820 (dual-core), to a regular Pentium 4 Prescott 3.2GhZ, thinking that the dual core was making FreeBSD go all goofy...apparently that’s not the case.
I'm kind of stumped as of what to do now. It seems to be like either the IDE/SATA controller is cooked, or there is just something wrong with this main board. I tried disconnecting my SATA hard drives, and installing on an IDE hard drive without luck.
I am having problem in ASWM (asus web based web management) where it controls the motherboard, bios setting, temperature and all this..
I am having problem in successfully installing this ****. If someone used this before or knows how to make this work, can you add me in msn congkaia.at.hotmail.com
1- i did Os Reload with new Hard drive for "home" 2- data "backups" drive lost
3- replaced the old home drive as "/old drive"
4- " /old drive " is now the secondry drive in my server and it has the all sites usres and evry thing
5- what i need , to trasfer, copy this sites from " /old drive " to "home"
but data center said
The /olddrive/home directory contains the contents that were previously in the /home directory. You can copy files from this directory to any other directory on your server.
The command to copy files in the UNIX environment is the "cp" command.
The user directories in /olddrive/home directory contain the web page files for the users. However, simply copying the contents over will not recreate the users or domain entries in DNS/httpd. If you wish these back you will need to recreate them manually or restore them from backups.
The server is displaying these errors when I tried to do an FSCK: Bad inode IO ext3-fs error (device(8,3)) IO Failure
I am having a new primary installed and old primary set as 2nd drive. I need to recover the cpanel domain accounts from this 2nd drive after I mount it with the method below:
mkdir /backup mount /dev/sdb1 /backup
However, how do I actually recover these accounts in an automated process via whm? I've done this before with the same matter (corrupt primary drive, mount as 2nd, etc) but cannot exactly remember the proper steps.
