Many people are having problems with hardware RAID1 (Mirror RAID) & CentOS 6.4
Especially if you are using a controller with the Marvel 88SE9128 Chipset
You will get an error along the lines of this – lvcreate failed for vg_hostname
There are plenty of posts out there saying “format the drives” “delete all partitions” blah blah waste of time it won’t work.
If you really want a hardware raid go back to CentOS 5.9 but that doesn’t help at all as the new PHP & other software updates requires CentOS 6.x
So how can you get a Mirror RAID solution with CentOS 6.x?
The Answer is a Software RAID… I know I know, it made me cringe as well but its the only solution to this.
Boot up your server making sure both hard drives are connected & not in a raid & boot off the CentOS 6.x DVD. (make sure all partitions have been deleted off the HDD’s before installation)
Select the first install/ upgrade option
follow the prompts & setup your installation as needed
once you get to the type of installation page select Create Custom Layout
You will now see the 2 drives available that you want for the mirror RAID Array (in my case I am using a virtual machine *VBOX* so I created 2 20GB virtual drives for this guide)
Click Create & select RAID Partition
Create a RAID partition on both drives. (I created a 500mb Boot partition & what ever is remaining is my second partition for the CentOS install etc)
Once you have what you see in the picture Click Create again but this time select RAID Device
The first RAID Device I will create will be for /boot (you select the 2 500mb partitions & set the mount point to /boot)
The next RAID Device I will create will be the Physical Volume (LVM)
Once this is done you need to Create the LVM Volume Group (click create again to get this option)
Click Add & create a small volume for SWAP & then add a volume for / & /home
Once that is done you should have something looking like this
& there you go a complete Software MIRROR RAID solution for CentOS 6.4
Click next & it will give you the usual prompts asking if you are sure you want to format the drives. Continue as per normal install after this.
If at anytime you want to check how the RAID ARRAY is going use terminal & the following command
cat /proc/mdstat
Thank you for this. Will try it out.
no worries mate :)
thank you, this page is very helpfull for me
Thanks for your very helpful hint ;-)
no worries :)
When you create raid boot partitions, do you check Force to be a primary partition?
No need to do that unless you have issues with your boot manager etc.