Thanks Mike, I feel like I am in over my head ATM. I have swapped the SATA connections in an effort to have the system recognise my 1Tb drive as the system device. But it made no difference. Now I am thinking that I should unplug the 2 x 2Tb disks and install the system on sda1 with a 1Gb /boot and lvm selected. Once I have a working system, then replug the SATA drives and set up RAID. In the past I used to be able to define a partition table but Ubuntu is doing my head in. It offered to use my 1Tb drive as a swap partition. Cheers Andrew Greig On 20/05/18 10:27, Mike O'Connor wrote:
Hi
I suggest the following. 1. Do not use ZFS unless you have ECC ram 2. btrfs has real issues in a number of area so unless you are very experienced I would not use it.
The Ubuntu installer supports creating both mdadm raid and LVM so maybe the following. 1. Partition both drives with 2 partitions 1.1 BOOT at about 1G (I know people say its not really needed now but I still feel its easier to fix things if you have issues with one) 1.2 All the rest of the drive 2. Create Raids of the partitions as raid 1 3. Set the partition type on the BOOT and directory 4. Create Volume Group on the largest partition 5. Create Logical Volumes for ROOT, SWAP and if you really want HOME 6. Set the partition type on the LV ROOT, SWAP and HOME
So why do it this way ? Well LVMs give a lot of options which as not available if there not there. This site has only a very simple example but give it a read http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/benefitsoflvmsmall.html
My 2 cents worth.
Mike
On 20/5/18 9:35 am, Andrew Greig wrote:
Thanks Andrew,
Drives are in and Ubuntu 18.04 is installing, I am offered an LVM option will that mess with RAID?
One other thing, will choosing btrfs orZFS just utilise the matched drives as a RAID pair?
If I go XFS, as my file system for all drives, then will I need the install to complete, then run mdadm to set the RAID?
I am so glad I am fresh for this.
Regards
Andrew Greig
On 20/05/18 00:21, Andrew Pam wrote:
On 20/05/18 00:04, Andrew Greig via luv-main wrote:
What should I do about partitioning? Should I use hard partitions say, 20Gb for the /root, should I use a /boot partition or just use the MBR? You don't really need a separate /boot partition any more unless you have an older BIOS that can only boot from the first part of the drive.
Is mdadm a part of this process or does it get involved later ? ZFS for the pair of drives? If you use ZFS or btrfs, you probably don't want to use mdadm (software RAID) as well. Better to take advantage of the filesystem-level mirroring. If you use another filesystem (such as XFS, which is what I use on my 4T RAID-1 mirror on my desktop workstation) you will need to install and set up mdadm first, yes.
Do I have to jump through hoops in Ubuntu to watch an MP4 or a Matroska video? Not if you select the "use third-party proprietary drivers and codecs" checkbox during the install - note that it's off by default, though. Or you can install VLC, which should come with all the codes you need.
Hope that helps, Andrew
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