What is the best way to install with 2 hard drives

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I am installing Pluto as a hybrid on a machine with two 200GB hard drives, and I have 2 questions for the Pluto guys.

Question 1: what is the best way to partition at installation so that Pluto utilizes both drives?

Note: LVM is not available during the initial partitioning; I had to apt-get it later.  Manually setting up the logical volume and volume group, and modifying /etc/fstab to automatically mount, caused Pluto to behave erratically, so I guess that's not the right way to do it.  

After I went through the initial setup of the hybrid, Pluto identified the second drive as a generic internal drive and asked if I wanted to use it (I didn't know it would do this).  I answered yes, and that's when the on-screen orbiter began to spontaneously reload.  This is the erratic behavior mentioned above.  

So, Question 2: what is the procedure for getting Pluto to recognize the second drive and use it for storage?

Appreciate any help...

Colby

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its sad that these forums dont seem to be as well supported as they should be , anyway heer is my 2 cents

using the new .40 disks you should be able to create a volume group and partition. I would recomend leaving /boot on a standard partition. I accomplished this by selecting erase first ide and use it then deleting both the / and /home partitions  then creating 2 partitions and allocating  both to LVM on the second drive a single partition and allocated it to LVM, then create 2 groups one "os" and one "home" I then created 2 volumes "osvol" and "homevol" and allocated the os partion to the osvol and the other 2 to the homevol , I currenlty have a 490GB /home .

It took a couple of attempts till i got it working. I also had to force the mounting of the home vol by adding a mount command in one of the rc scripts the system automatically mounted the "svol" , it is strange but its seems to be working .

Would be nice if I could say the same for my media directors. Oh well , I guess its not prime time yet.

Good Luck

Dean

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Dean - thanks for the info.

I did mine a little differently than yours.  I let the partitioner create the default scheme on the first HD, then went back and changed the /home partition to a "Used by LVM" partition.  Did the same to the other drive, then used LVM to create the volume group "lvhome".

I didn't monkey with any of the other partitions, and the /home partition seems to mount just fine without any .rc editing.

What I have discovered is that Pluto wants to identify that logical volume as a "Generic Internal Drive" that you can store things on.  However, since /home is already recognized by the system, you can tell it "no, and don't ask again" and it won't display a separate drive on the screen with your media titles.

Thanks for the help!

v/r
Colby

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Looks like I may have spoken too soon - my /home is still mapped to the / partition, not the logical volume.  I'll try your solution, Dean.

v/r
Colby

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Hi Colby

You plan should be simpler , from what I remeber you delete the /home partition, then create a new partition and allocate it to lvm. Then you create a single partition on second drive and allocate that to lvm. then you go to the lVM manager and create a logical group , allocaing both partition to the group. The go to logival volumes and create a volume the size of both partitions once this is done you go back to the partition manager and format the new partitin with ext3 and mount it as /home

Regards
Dean

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Dean,

I did exactly that last night.  Problem is, the logical volume isn't mounting to to /home, and I'm not sure why.  There's an entry in /etc/fstab, which was generated by the partitioner to take care of the mount, and it looks correct.  However, it appears that despite this entry, /home is still mounted to the root filesystem instead of the logical volume.  I confirmed this by ripping a CD to the server and watching the used space on the root filesystem increase.

I'm tempted just to create one huge logical volume with both disks and put all of the filesystems on it, not just /home.  Any thoughts on whether this would be OK?  It would certainly accomplish what I want...

v/r
Colby

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i would advise against that , what I would do is create a temp dircetory say /root/home
 then copy all data , files etc from /home/ to /root/home (personally I always use rsync , apt-get install rsync) then the cmd is
rsync -avP /home/ /root/home/

Then activate the {home} volume this is probably what the problem is.
check the current status with
 lvscan
vgchange -al {home}
then mount the /home partition assuming there is an entry similar to this in fstab
/dev/mapper/home-home /home           ext3    defaults,user_xattr 0       2

simply by issuing the cmd mount /home

then rsync back the contents of your /home partition by using
rsync -avP /root/home/ /home/
assuming that your parition mounted etc.

now just dont reboot (lol)

I then added the /sbin/vgchange -ay {home} to /etc/rcS.d/S30checkfs.sh right at the top. Its a hack I know but it is working. this way the {home} volume is activated on boot. I would not recommend putting /boot on a lvm even / is touch and go , rather stick with your initial plan and just do /home

I am still wondering how I am ever going to upgrade my server or back it up as I have more used space on it than I do free space anywhere else.

Good Luck

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Dean,

  Everything you described worked for me except for the addition to the startup script to automatically activate the volume group.  Maybe I got something slightly wrong in the addition, but what I put in the script works from the command prompt.   Could you paste a copy of your script here so I can compare?

Thanks.

v/r
Colby