[ydl-gen] YDL 5 installation on Xserve

[Bill Fink]

On Mon, 17 Sep 2007, Atro Tossavainen wrote:

> If I check "Review and modify", I get to start from another interesting
> default partition table.  Apple_Bootstrap, /boot and root on the first
> hard drive, swap on the second hard drive.  Deleting swap moves root
> to the second hard drive.  Deleting root and boot I now have a partition
> table where Apple_Bootstrap is on the first hard drive, nothing else,
> and the second drive is completely empty.  I then click on RAID, and
> the only option presented is to create a software RAID partition (fair
> enough, it's hard to build a metadevice without partitions to build it
> on).  I proceed to create a 100 MB swRAID partition on both drives to
> use as /boot.  The next step is to create the metadevice.  It gives me
> the options of RAID0, RAID1 and RAID1 (yes, the latter twice).  I make
> /dev/md0 a RAID1 of /dev/hde3 and /dev/hdg2, with ext3, to be mounted
> at /boot.  I repeat the steps for a 16 GB partition to be used as root
> (hde4 and hdg3), and for a 2 GB partition to be used as swap (hde4 and
> hdg3 again - it has moved root into hde5 and hdg4 in the meantime).
> 
> The scheme is now deficient in the sense that the second hard drive is
> missing an Apple_Bootstrap partition.  If the first hard drive goes,
> all data is safe but I will be unable to boot.

If you can manage to get an empty partition reserved on hdg, you should
be able to create a boot partition on it manually using hformat and
ybin/mkofboot.  And hopefully your partition layouts would then be
basically identical between the two drives.  Before running "ybin -v"
(which will invoke mkofboot), add an appropriate "ofboot=" line to
your /etc/yaboot.conf file to reference the boot partition on the
second disk.  Finally, comment out the "ofboot=" line and re-run
"ybin -v" to restore default booting from the first disk.  Also check
if the "device=" or any other yaboot settings need to be modified
for the case of the second disk.

You should then be able to boot using the second disk by booting into
OpenFirmware and changing the OF variable boot-device to reflect the
location of the boot partition on the second disk.  You can also define
OF aliases using OF nvramrc and devalias to assist with this process
(I believe my FireWire booting HOWTO has detailed info on that).

Of course all this is from a theoretical standpoint on my part as I've
never messed around with Linux software RAID myself, but I think it
should be workable.

						-Bill