Re: [Clonezilla-live] Cloning imsm RAID1 disks

[Michal S. <hra...@ce...>]

On 22 February 2011 11:17,  <jur...@le...> wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 23:22:04 +0800
>> From: Steven Shiau <st...@nc...>
>> Subject: Re: [Clonezilla-live] Cloning imsm RAID1 disks
>> To: clo...@li...
>> Message-ID: <4D5...@nc...>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>>
>>
>> On 02/15/2011 06:02 PM, jur...@le... wrote:
>> > Dear all,
>> >
>> > As you may know, many Intel motherboards ship with a BIOS fakeraid
>> > (software raid).  Presently, Clonezilla doesn't seem to know how to
>> > handle these, apparently due to mdadm being too old: as far as I know,
>> > imsm is supported starting from mdadm V3 and higher.  I checked the
>> > ubuntu packages, and came to know that v3 will be shipped in the
>> > upcoming release 11.04 (natty).  The present version of mdadm is below
>> > 3.
>> >
>> > Will Clonezilla support imsm raids by default, and if so, do we need
>> > to CTRL-ALT-F2 and fire-up the RAID first with some command line magic?
>> When Natty is released as stable, we will use it as the OS of
>> alternative Clonezilla live. Then you will have mdadm v3 in Clonezilla
>> live.
>> So far the RAID support in Clonezilla is not well, and hope we can
>> support it in the near future.
>> BTW, if you are interested in testing the Natty-based Clonezilla live,
>> please let me know. We can create one recently.
>
> Yes, thanks, I'm interested.  I tried with the Natty alfa from last week,
> and I must say it was not working perfectly.  I could mount one of the two
> disks, which wasn't possible before, but I couldn't get the software RAID to
> start (I must add that I noticed that the guys from Intel don't like their
> RAID being called 'fakeraid' :-) so I will just call it software RAID).

It's fakeraid all right. Especially it desyncs when the OS crashes and
has to be rebuilt.

Either way I was able to bring up these fakeraid arrays on some
boards. If using the whole of Natty causes issues you can just install
the mdadm from natty. Note that you will probably need to add the
whole source in case mdadm requires some libraries not present in
Maverick. You will probably want to set the preferred distribution to
Maverick in apt.conf to prevent installing packages from Natty
needlessly.

You can also try to just add the Natty source on one of the clonezilla
live CDs and upgrade mdadm on the running live system. Unless the CD
is too munged by the clonezilla CD mastering scripts it should work.

HTH

Michal