On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 10:25:13PM +1100, Andrew Greig wrote:
I apologise for my carelessness. In the days when I needed frequent help (2000 - 2007) bottom posting was preferred, and so I defaulted to that position. It was not laziness, just a lack of awareness that I included too much of the thread. Most of my early days of assistance were fixed within one or two posts.
Bottom posting has NEVER been preferred. it has always been reviled, especially in tech forums. Top posting is worse in some ways (in that it screws up the chronological order of quites), but at least the reader doesn't have to scroll past hundreds of lines of repeated text. Edited quotes with interleaved replies is the only good way to do quoting.
That this has dragged on so long is a frustration for me. I made a mistake when I first loaded Ubuntu in that I did not have the other two drives available, then, by installing a user system instead of a server system I precluded setting up the two drives in RAID or btrfs.
I'm sure that your current situation is fixable, but it requires a fair bit of knowledge and experience about drives and partitions and filesystems. and the boot process. It also requires a detailed log of the boot process (which, as i mentioned i my last message, is hidden by the useless ubuntu boot logo. because branding is more important than technical info).
And this is what has led to believe that my easy way out of this is to do a clean install with all my drives connected and choose "server" and hopefully the bouncing ball will get me to a cheerful conclusion.
That may be the easiest solution. remember to backup your data first :) Also, as I said in my last message: 1. upgrade your RAM. 16GB minimum if you're running gimp and darktable and a browser and who knows what else. 2. consider getting an SSD (or a pair of them in RAID-1) for the boot/OS drive. The cheapest SSDs start at around $30 for 128GB these days and will be MUCH faster than any mechanical drive. 128GB is enough for the kernel and the root fs, use the new 3TB drives as /home. A 256GB Crucial MX500 is about $75, with performance of about 560 MB/s read and 510 MB/s write (approx 4 or 5 times faster than any mechanical drive). Having two drives in RAID-1 not only adds redundancy to the storage, it will generally double the read speed (but not the write). IMO if money is tight, having two 128GB drives in RAID-1 is better than one 256GB drive...but note that most 128GB SSDs are older, last-gen technology. If your motherboard has NVME slots, then it's worth paying the extra $45 for something like the 250GB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS (~ $120) - around 3500 MB/s read and 3300 MB/s write. About six times faster than a SATA3 SSD. I still recommend buying a pair so you can have RAID-1, which doubles the price to $240 (but note that the 500GB model is $169, or $338 for a pair, so is much better value for money). BTW, if your m/b doesn't have nvme slots you can get PCI-e cards that have 1, 2, or 4 nvme slots on them....but it's worth doing research before buying because some can boot off the nvme and some can't. here's something not too old as a starting point: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-pcie-add-in-cards-can-boot-a-nvme-...
So I will read your response in the morning when I am fresh, and I am grateful for your continued assistance. I thought that by using a raid system or the btrfs then I may have had some security for my data, but maybe I should just use the now substantial amount of storage I have and just buy more cloud space when I need it.
RAID (in any form, including mdadm, lvm, btrfs or zfs) is good. It greatly reduces the number of times you NEED to restore from backup (and filesystem snapshots as provided by btrfs and zfs do too)....but remember that backups will still always be necessary. RAID IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUP. (also, RAID-0 is not really RAID and provides NO redundancy. It actually increases your risk of catastrophic data loss). craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>