Comments on: Installing a software RAID 10 Debian system with LUKS disk encryption

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 04 May 2020 06:51:16 +0000

After setup, the system boots succesfully with two disks installed. However, then as a test, when removing the disk with the EFI partition on it, and trying to boot, I get ‘no boot device’. This was rather obvious since I had to install the EFI partition manually and could only do this on one disk. What suprised me though was that on testing with the other disk removed, I get “cryptsetup: waiting for encrypted source device xxxx-xxxxx-xxxx-xxxx”. I ended up going without raid.

By: Timm

Timm — Mon, 04 May 2020 02:42:38 +0000

Can you also show how to rebuild the RAID in case a drive fails, please?

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 01 May 2020 16:03:56 +0000

Hi Theo, thanks very much for the guide, much appreciated! One issue I ran into: I followed the guide on a Dell T40 with Debian 10.3, to install a raid 1 array with to SSD’s. After trying to finish the partitioning, I get ‘No EFI System Partition Found, return to partioning?”

This was solved by re-starting all over and deleting the partition table, then creating an extra 512MB FAT32 non-raid partiion at the start of the disk, and marking it for use as EFI. 512MB is probably way too large, but I did not feel like doing this a third time.

Unfortunately, EFI partitions cannot be software raided it seems. If you have any thoughts on this please let me know.

By: Neklaf's Hodgepodge

Neklaf's Hodgepodge — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 16:40:55 +0000

[…] Some references: https://www.theo-andreou.org/?p=1778 […]

By: Ondrej

Ondrej — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 08:57:21 +0000

Thanks for this post. Awesome ideas 🙂
Cheers from Czech Republic

By: Theodotos Andreou

Theodotos Andreou — Thu, 17 May 2018 10:21:06 +0000

In reply to Joshua Palmer.

I guess your mileage may vary then. Good to know. Thanks for the feedback Joshua.

By: Joshua Palmer

Joshua Palmer — Wed, 16 May 2018 21:59:28 +0000

In reply to Joshua Palmer.

Just finished testing, and it didn't work for me. Using an HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 (BIOS), I followed these steps to the letter. The OS installs, then fails when trying to install GRUB2. For the second test, I created a GRUB BIOS partition on each drive (for failover), tried again, and installation completed successfully.

By: Theodotos Andreou

Theodotos Andreou — Wed, 16 May 2018 05:53:12 +0000

In reply to Joshua Palmer.

It should work without that. Give it a try and let us know.

By: Joshua Palmer

Joshua Palmer — Tue, 15 May 2018 18:47:00 +0000

In reply to Theodotos Andreou.

Outstanding! I've been waiting for that to happen.

One more thing. I'm not certain this will work as described with the BIOS partition step removed. Did it just work for you without that step on a BIOS machine, or are you running UEFI. Once again -- am I just living in the past?

By: Theodotos Andreou

Theodotos Andreou — Tue, 15 May 2018 03:34:38 +0000

In reply to Joshua Palmer.

I remember that yes. How things change... :)

root@storage:~# cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [raid10] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] 
md1 : active raid10 sdb3[1] sda3[0] sdd3[3] sdc3[2]
      5858271232 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 12/44 pages [48KB], 65536KB chunk

md0 : active raid10 sdb2[1] sda2[0] sdd2[3] sdc2[2]
      997376 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU]

unused devices: <none>

root@storage:~# df -hT
Filesystem            Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                  devtmpfs  990M     0  990M   0% /dev
tmpfs                 tmpfs     201M   21M  180M  11% /run
/dev/mapper/VG00-ROOT ext4      5,5T  488G  4,7T  10% /
tmpfs                 tmpfs    1002M   96K 1002M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                 tmpfs     5,0M     0  5,0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs                 tmpfs    1002M     0 1002M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/md0              ext4      943M   94M  785M  11% /boot
tmpfs                 tmpfs     201M     0  201M   0% /run/user/0