efibootmgr: option requires an argument -- 'd' efibootmgr version 15 grub-install.real: error: efibootmgr failed to register the boot entry: Operation not permitted.

This sometimes happens when trying to install the EFIversion of grub to a device when you are booted into Legacy/MBR mode. It doesn't seem to occur on all machines, but some and seems somewhat BIOS dependent. grub-install --target=x86_64-efi /dev/sda Installing for x86_64-efi platform. grub-install.real: warning: Couldn't find physical volume `(null)'. Some modules may be missing from core image.. grub-install.real: warning: Couldn't find physica........

How to access a disk with bad superblock Linux Ubuntu Debian Redhat CentOS ext3 ext4

Have you ever tried mounting a partition that you exists but you get this error? mount: /mnt: can't read superblock on /dev/sda1. The superblock in this example was bad because the physical disk had corruption and bad blocks/sectors. However, the data was generally accessible and you can always try this trick below (with caution and no warranty). This is specifically for filesystems that place superblocks in multiple locations, which........

Linux grub not using UUID for the root device instead it uses /dev/sda1 or other device name solution

You can read lots of posts about this issue but there is not much information about why this is the case or how grub determines the root= device name. Some even suggest modifying grub.cfg manually which is a disaster as the next kernel update will cause grub to revert back to the device name. For most people this won't be an issue but those using template system, automated deployments and working in embedded may run into this issue with custom embedded and created minimal kernel........

How To Restore Partition Table on Running Linux Mint Ubuntu Debian Machine

Here is an easy way to restore things if you have the starting point and size of each partition using fdisk: In this example we pretend that /dev/sda was wiped out, but the running system still has the info in /sys/class/block/sda Go into each partition and record the "start" and "size" hostdev@box /sys/class/block/sda/sda1 $ cat start 2048 hostdev@box /sys/class/block/sda/sd........

grub blank screen how to manually boot kernel and initrd Linux Ubuntu Debian Centos won't boot solution

You probably didn't do an "update-grub" and grub no longer has any proper menu entries, but before you can fix it let's try to get grub booting anyway. If you get this lovely black grub screen here's how you can get things booting. In my case I have a gpt partition with partition 1 and 2. Partion 1 is just my EFI / ESPand partion 2 /dev/sda2 is my root which includes /boot. You will have to adjust this if you had a separate /boot partition.........

How To Install convert MBR Legacy booting GRUB to EFI from a non-EFI Linux Environment Ubuntu Mint Debian

1.) Create your EFI/ESP Partition If you happen to have some free space on the drive already then this is easy, just create a new partition of at least 100M. The nice thing about the EFI spec is that it must just be in the first 2.2TB of space so for most users, it means you can simply resize the last partition(downsize it by 100M) and then add an EFI partition at the end. For example if you had this partition scheme: /dev/sda1 = /........

Linux can't boot/grub boot loader screen with no options solution

Usually if you get the grub boot loader and it doesn't show any boot options, it's because grub was not installed correctly and/or the partition that it is supposed to be on has changed or does not exist. It can also happen if you install Linux to one drive, but the boot loader to another by accident, whether EFI or MBR/Legacy mode. You can normally fix your booting/bootloader/MBR/EFI it by chrooting into your root partition: #become root sudo su........

Linux Mint Dual Boot Install Avoid Wiping our your Main C: drive /dev/sda MBR and EFI

Before you try to install and dual boot it is very important to understand the concept of "what boot mode your BIOS is in" and "what mode you booted the installer to". Then follow the example of Linux Mint (but most Linux installers are very similar)to carefully understand WHERE you are installing your Boot Loader to whether that be MBR or EFI. How Am IBooted? First it's important to check your BIOS to see........

mdadm how to stop a check

Is a mdadm check on your trusty software RAID array happening at the worst time and slowing down your server or NAS? cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [raid10] md127 : active raid10 sdb4[0] sda4[1] 897500672 blocks super 1.2 2 near-copies [2/2] [UU] [==========>..........] check = 50.4% (452485504/897500672) finish=15500.3min speed=478K/sec ........

virt-resize: error: libguestfs error: could not create appliance through libvirt.

This is caused because the user is running as qemu for virt-resize and if qemu does not have privileges to read from the source and write to the destination, it will fail with the below. So either change the uid of qemu or change the ownership of the source and target. Solution: export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct virt-resize --expand /dev/sda2 /root/kvmtemplates/windows2019-eval-template.img /root/kvmguests/kvmkvmuser4515........

OpenVZ vs LXC DIR mode poor security in LXC

It is unfortunate that LXC's dir mode is completely insecure and allows way too much information from the host to be seen. I wonder if there will eventually be a way to break into the host filesystem or other container's storage? OpenVZ better security: [root@ev ~]# cat /proc/mdstat cat: /proc/mdstat: No such file or directory /dev/simfs 843G 740G 61G........

Convert and install to LUKS Encrypted Drive Ubuntu 18.04 19.10 Linux Mint and Debian Based Linux

The reason for doing this is that the installer doesn't seem to work properly for LUKS and the server installer doesn't even support LUKS anymore. When you use the GUI install on Desktop for LUKS it won't boot and will just hang after you enter your password. So the only reliable way is to do it ourselves. 1.) Make a default minimal install of Ubuntu 2.) Have a secondary disk on the server or VM. 3.)........

CentOS 8 how to convert to a bootable mdadm RAID software array

The cool thing here is that we only need 1 drive to make a RAID 10 or RAID 1 array, we just tell the Linux mdadm utility that the other drive is "missing" and we can then add our original drive to the array after booting into our new RAID array. Step#1 Install tools we need yum -y install mdadm rsync Step #2 Create your partitions on the drive that will be our RAID array Here I assume it is /dev........

dd how to backup and restore disk images including compression with gzip

dd is a very handy tool and there are some more practical things we can do. For example if we want to dump a 3TB drive and want to preserve it and only 200GB are being used on the 3TB we can save a lot of space with gzip. Backing Stuff up with dd How to Use dd to backup a raw hard drive and tar gzip at once Change /dev/sda to the drive you want to backup Change /mnt/extras........

How To Restore Windows MBR Bootsector from Linux using syslinux

There are many ways but a favorite way is to boot any Linux LiveCD and to use the syslinux package like so: Just change the "sdx" to your sd for example /dev/sda or whatever the drive is that is supposed to boot Windows. sudo dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdx 0+1 records in 0+1 records out 440 bytes copied, 0.0197808 s, 22.2 kB/s........

Cisco Unified Communications Manager / CUCM IP 8.6,10,12 Install Error Solution

Install Errors on Version 12: This error happened on QEMU emulator version 2.11.1 pve-qemu-kvm_2.11.1-5 on Proxmox/Debian but installing on QEMU.12 on Centos 6 did not produce the error. *Update it is not related to the OS or QEMU version. This happened in Centos 6 too after a second install. What really causes this even though you successfully install........

Cisco Unified Communications Manager 12 Install Errors on Proxmox/KVM

The strange thing is that usually the first install or two will work on any new machine but then it suddenly won't. I had this experience on QEMU 2.13 on a different machine. There is something finicky or buggy about the CUCM installer even when choosing the same virtual hardware specs. qemu-kvm command: /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -version QEMU PC emulator version 0.12.1 (qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.506.el6_10.1), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard ........

How To Use Letsencrypt SSL/TLS Encryption to Create Certificates without installing on the target machine

For some reason, perhaps you don't want to run a daemon or let Letsencrypt have access to your production server. There is a way to use it like a normal CSR/CA setup in manual mode. ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --manual -d realtechtalk.com - www.realtechtalk.com Eventually you will get prompted to create a certain path and file with certain data: Create a file containing just this data: Casdfasfadsfsad........

How To Boot Cisco CUCM UCSInstall 8.6, 10, 11 and 12 on KVM/Proxmox

The key thing is that you must use a "machine"id of "pc-1.3" or it will say your hardware is not supported. Additionally you MUST use a virtio disk or you will get a ks_pre.sh error as soon as the install starts (a look at logs will show it can't find a disk). This is funny because even though the OS finds the disk and an fdisk -l shows it, it looks like the script looks for a /dev/vda device (virtio) and nothing else, so if you didn't use Virtio as you........

LUKS Hard Drive Encryption on Linux Mint Ubuntu Debian etc how to mount encrypted hard drive

The key thing here is to know the actual partition that is encrypted. Often in Linux Mint's installer that ends up being partition 5 or /dev/sda5 sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 anynamehere You will then be prompted for your irrecoverable passphrase: Enter passphrase for /dev/sda5: If all goes well it won't say anything further. If it says ""No key available with this passphr........

Centos 7 Reallocate logical volume space to another

Do you hate how Centos 7 defaults to allocating most of your valuable space to /home even though it is a production server? Here is a quick guide on how to take back that space live, while online (of course make sure you have backups just in case something goes wrong!): First we will reduce our home dir by 100G: lvreduce -L -100G /dev/mapper/centos-home WARNING: Reducing active and open logical volume to ........

Linux partprobe/partx cannot access last and 4th partition

On a test machine Iwas never able to access to a newly created 4th partiton. As we can see there are dev devices for everything but the 4th partition. The normal "partprobe" or "kpartx" or kernel being told to rescan the block device didn't help (only a reboot did). fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders Units........

Why SMART is not smart at all and doesn't properly predict disk errors that cause a kernel panic or crash

Before getting into the output here is my typical experience with SMART, there is what I call a "bad disk" with pending and uncorrectable sectors that cannot be reallocated. It has caused a kernel panic and system crash repeatedly as we can see from the logs. But SMART says it has "PASSED" its self assessment. SMART is still useful to me but it is more about looking at Current_Pending_Sector. Any time I have had anything but 0 for that attribute it........

hwloc-nox set CPU affinity in Linux

sudo apt-get install hwloc-nox Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: hwloc-nox 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 530 not upgraded. Need to get 151 kB of archives. After this operation, 453 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubunt........

Ubuntu/Debian/Linux won't boot and drops to Busybox shell after cloning HDD with dd

I don't recall having this issue in the distant past but nowadays at least Debian seems to be very picky about this. I used dd to copy one hard drive to another and tried booting it. Everything seemed fine with grub working but each time it would drop to the busybox shell. There is no particular error so this is misleading. Normally the first things you would check are to make sure your fstab is correct (that the UUID is correct)and that you've updated grub.&........

cannot mount kvm ntfs image

guestmount -a kvmuserscra.img -m /dev/sda1 mount libguestfs: error: mount_options: /dev/sda1 on / (options: ''): mount: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs' guestmount: '/dev/sda1' could not be mounted. guestmount: Did you mean to mount one of these filesystems? guestmount: /dev/sda1 (ntfs) guestmount: /dev/sda2 (ntfs) yum -y install ntfs-3g still........

Linux how to copy GPT partition table with dd

The old MBR 512 bytes partition table is no longer valid if you are using GPT. To copy a GPT table with dd to another disk do it like so: Below sda is the source disk and destination disk is sdb (change to meet your needs). Depending on how you use this, you have to be careful. The assumption is that you should only dump the partition table back to a disk you will newly format. If not you'll need to ch........

Migrate Centos 7 from Single HDD to mdadm RAID 10 array:

Done on Centos 7.3 very important as clearly based on older guides it was a lot easier and more simpler! Hint do not use grub2-install! If you have trouble booting after this check this CentOS mdadm RAID booting/fixing guide. One huge caveat if you are an oldschool user or sysadmin who has avoided UEFIbooting The nor........

Migrating from Linux Mint 17.2 mdadm RAID array to a new one (because I upgraded to larger drives).

1.) Replicate the number of partitions in your new drives. gdisk /dev/sda gdisk /dev/sdb I created 3 partitions of the same same size. partition #1: +1G (/boot) partition #2: +60G (swap) partition #3: rest of it (/) #note if you are using GPT/gdisk you need to create separate a partition at least 1MB in size (in my case I would a 4th partition and mark it type ef02).........

Linux how to enable and disable NCQ

To disable NCQ in the Linux kernel (change sda to match your device). echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth To enable NCQ (change sda to match your device). echo 31 > /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth........

mdadm zero-superblock to solve md device created on root device

It is possible to tell mdadm to create an md device on a raw disk even though it will give you an error, it writes a superblock and this corrupts the partition table which can result in your system not booting. To fix it just zero the super-block on the offending device that you made the mistake in. Eg: /dev/sda mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sda It is also a way of starting fresh if you wanted to create a new array.........

Linux How To Recover Partition Table from Kernel and Restore Centos/Debian etc..

We've all done this at some point, you work on the wrong shell window and this was my first time making this mistake but I deleted a partition table in fdisk, recreated it and saved it with "wq" and even ran partprobe! If you haven't rebooted yet then you can still recover your partition table, otherwise you're in big trouble. Fortunately since it was a live system and in use the kernel still had to use the old table like below:........

weird mv error mv: inter-device move failed:

mv -f /home/user/Downloads/android-studio/ /mnt/sda3/ mv: inter-device move failed: ‘/home/user/Downloads/android-studio/’ to ‘/mnt/sda3/android-studio’; unable to remove target: Is a directory........

Centos installing grub problems suspect gpt problem

grub> root (hd0,0) root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd grub> setup (hd0) setup (hd0) But if you do: root (hd1,0) setup (hd1) it does work, I think hd0/sda had a GPT partition that was not removed properly (what I did was just dd bs=512 count=1 the partition table from another drive since the partition table should be identical). Checking if "/boot/grub/........

mdadm real example of recovery and rebuilding of the array on Centos 6

In this example we have 2 drives in a RAID array and /dev/sdb is the one that failed. /dev/sda1 is also the /boot partition which we tell grub to install on /dev/sdb eg install root (hd0,0) /dev/sda1 on the new drive /dev/sdb (hd1) First copy the partition table from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 Run partprobe to detect the new partition table partprobe........

How To Install Linux Mint 17.2 on mdadm RAID with a separate boot partition

Iwas surprised to see that Linux Mint at the latest 17.2 version still has NO mdadm installer option, and worse the installer will not be able to create a proper booting environment even when you do install it. How to setup mdadm in Linux mint LiveCD sudo su apt-get install mdadm # partition as you need and then create your mdadm devices # create your SWAP md0 mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /d........

bash script linux how to do a wildcard string comparison

if [[ "$templatesource" == *windows* ]]; then partition=/dev/sda2 fi The * before and after * windows will match this "Ihavelotsofwindowshere" Of we could have used "windows*" and anything that starts with "windows" will be matched etc...........

libguestfs tools howto guide for mounting partitions and managing virtual machine images

libguestfs tools howto guide for managing virtual machine images. libguestfs-tools aka guestfs tools has a lot of tools that make this very easy for you. You can easily mount partitons from an image with some of the commands below. To mount a partition #mount the kvmuser102821.img image and the /dev/sda1 partition from it to the local directory "mount" guestmount -a kvmuser102821.img -m /dev/sda1 mount ........

drbd 8.3 hard drive failure recovery example

drbd 8.3 hard drive failure recovery drbdadm attach r0 DRBD module version: 8.3.10 userland version: 8.3.8 you should upgrade your drbd tools! 0: Failure: (119) No valid meta-data signature found. ==> Use 'drbdadm create-md res' to initialize meta-data area. ........

Howto Convert Xen Image to KVM

#count=10000 makes an image of 10000MB make sure your image is at least the same as your existing dd if=/dev/zero of=yourimage.img bs=1M count=10000 # losetup -fv newimage.raw # fdisk -cu /dev/loop0 # kpartx -a /dev/loop0 # dd if= of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 # e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 # resize2fs /dev/mapper/loop0p1 # a lot of guides tell you to edit /etc/fst........

How to view GPT/EFI Windows Partition Table

fdisk unfortunately can't do this and I'm not sure if there's any updated version that handles it but parted can do it. Here's an example of how to do it: parted /dev/sda print 1 17.4kB 1024MB 1024MB ntfs primary 2 1024MB 16144MB 15120MB ntfs primary /dev/sda1 would be the first partiton /dev/sda2 would be the second partition You can then just access them like any other normal partition.........

What a hdd hard drive and mdadm RAID array failure looks like in Linux

[3805108.257042] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) [3805108.257052] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off [3805108.257054] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [3805108.257066] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [3805108.257083] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) [3805108.257090] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off........

Migrate Linux Mint OS from one drive to another

mount -o bind /proc /sda2/proc mount -o bind /dev/ /sda2/dev mount -o bind /sys /sda2/sys chroot /sda2 mint / # mount -o bind /proc /sda2/proc mint / # mount -o bind /dev/ /sda2/dev mint / # mount -o bind /sys /sda2/sys mint / # chroot /sda2 mint / # cd ~ mint ~ # ls Desktop mint ~ # cd / mint / # ls bin Desktop dev-temp home&nb........

mdadm: Cannot open /dev/sda1: Device or resource busy

This was caused by some weird dmraid setup which kind of takes control of drives even if they're blank/unused. 1. Check the table. dmsetup table ddf1_44656c6c202020201000006010281f0b3f5195b77cf86172: 0 3905945600 linear 8:0 0 ddf1_44656c6c202020201000006010281f0b3f5195b77cf86172p3: 0 37124096 linear 253:0 284547072 ddf1_44656c6c202020201000006010281f0b3f5195b77cf86172p2: 0 283496448 linear 253:0 1050624 ddf1_44656c6c2020202010........

mdadm how to add additional RAID 1 drives

This is a great way to upgrade your RAID array or move it/copy it to a new set of hard drives. Eg. you have a current RAID 1 array on older/slower drives. Just add at least 1 of the new drives to the array, update grub/install it and then boot into it. Then you have a transparent data migration that is fully synchronized. mdadm --grow /dev/md126 --raid-devices 3 md127 : active raid1 sdc1........

guestmount to mount a disk image

guestmount -a yourimage.img -m /dev/sda1 --ro /mountpoint Change "yourimage.img"to the actual disk image. Change "/dev/sda1" to the device on the disk image you want to mount. --ro is specified only if you don't want write access (good to ensure you don't mess anything up if you just want to recover data).........

LSI MegaRAID Adventures, Guide and HowTo

LSi Megaraid At first it was configured as a RAID 0, then I deleted the Virtual Disk Group. I thought both drives would be shown and detected in Linux as sda and sdb but it actually shows nothing. To make them work you have to hit Ctrl+R before the system boots (when prompted) and create a Virtual Disk Group. In my case I created each one as RAID 0 (with a single drive only) as I just wanted JBOD but there is no such option or default in these Dell Pe........

Brand new WDD 500GB Blue 3.5 SATA Drive Dead After Shipping

These drives seem to die very easily during shipping: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 18 8b 65 e0 00 00 08 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 411788768 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 18 8b........

WD 20EARX 2TB Bad within days

This is just trying to read 5GB off the drive with dd and the drive initially tested ok but shortly after I wondered why I was seeing 2MB/s read speeds. Notice the "current_pending_sector", anytime I've seen it at anything above 0 even with no other bad fields/attributes, it means the drive is bad. ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x3 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED ata1.00: cmd 60/00:00:........

mdadm create RAID 1 array example

mdadm --create /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0] 1363020736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] [=>...................] resync = 8.3% (113597440/1363020736) finish=276.2min speed=75366K/sec ........

SMARTCTL Enable SMART on Device Solution for Error "Device does not support SMART Error Counter logging not supported"

smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl version 5.36 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ Device: ATA WDC WD1600YS-01S Version: 20.0 Serial number: WD-WCAP03024940 Device type: disk Local Time is: Mon Apr 29 21:40:07 2013 PDT Device does not support SMART Error Counter logging not supported........

mdadm recover from dead drive

mdadm --manage /dev/md3 --add /dev/sda1 cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md0 : inactive sdd2[1] sdd1[2](S) 31270272 blocks md3 : active raid1 sda1[2] sdb1[1] sdc1[3](F) 943730240 blocks [2/1] [_U] [>....................]........

lvm resize and use the remaining extra space

df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/vg_12-lv_root 50G 1.2G 46G 3% / tmpfs 7.8G 0&nb........

mdadm: /dev/sdb1 not large enough to join array solution

mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/sdb1 mdadm: metadata format 00.90 unknown, ignored. mdadm: metadata format 00.90 unknown, ignored. mdadm: metadata format 00.90 unknown, ignored. mdadm: /dev/sdb1 not large enough to join array md1's first primary member /dev/sda3 has 57394 cylinders while the /dev/sdb1 has 57393 (1 less cylinder) which is why it won't work. fdisk -l /dev/sda3 Disk /dev/sda3: 47........

How to view an EFI GPT partition in Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes 256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38761 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16128 * 512 = 8257536 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 38........

IO/delay and high load when a SATA hard drive dies

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null creates ever increasing load every second. After minutes the load has moved up to 4.79 I've tried with two different discs in my system. I wonder if it's a delay or problem with the SATA bus because one drive I have connected has recently failed. I notice when drives fail that you get some IO/blocking issue when they don't respond properly. Yes I believe it was, because here's the same disc after removing the dead........

Linux Out of Memory OOM Object Killer Solution "Out of memory: kill process 1955 (sshd) score 81 or a child"

I had a system running a 128MB live CD image with 2.8 gigs of available RAM and the OOM kernel killer went crazy when using dd for more than 8 minutes and kept killing everything. I've read that this is due to a low-memory issue and paging in the kernel and 32-bit systems with lots of RAM. I even enabled swapspace on my LiveCD and the issue happened 25 minutes into dd rather than 8 minutes, so what gives? Also no swap space was ever used! cat /proc/s........

How To Test If Your Hard Drive Is Good/Signs of dying hard drive

I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem: We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........

smart is not smart, it thinks a dead drive is still good

I had a dying drive that smart thought until it totally disappeared was a good drive, and actually all parameters did look fine but this system was causing my system to lockup and other bad behavior: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 Serial Number: WD-WMAZ20139 Firmware Version: 50.0AB50 User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes Device........

How to recover from dead DRBD partition/hard drive in two simple commands

This assumes that you've at least created the correct partition for your DRBD already. Notice that I am "diskless", that's because either your DRBD partition doesn't exist/has been renamed (eg. sdb becomes sda when sdb dies and you reboot) or because that drive is really actually dead/gone. *If you need to permanently change the partition/device for your resource be sure to edit /etc/drbd.conf on both hosts and reload the config. (replace r0 with........

SMARTCTL additional SMART command testing using short and long tests

smartctl -t long /dev/sda (note you can specify short, but it's not as thorough as long of course). smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION === Sending command: "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-line mode". Drive command "Execute SMART Extended sel........

Are my WDEARS20 Drives dying already?

This happened during a RAID array check: SMART says both drives pass the test, but I'm doing a long test on them and hopefully this is not a hardware error. Apr 3 04:22:01 remote kernel: md: syncing RAID array md2 Apr 3 04:22:01 remote kernel: md: minimum _guaranteed_ reconstruction speed: 1000 KB/sec/disc. Apr 3 04:22:01 remote kernel: md: using maximum available idle IO bandwidth (but not more than 200000 KB/sec) for reconstruction. Apr........

CPU #1 not responding - cannot use it.

I think this will be useful to others because I have a server that kept crashing mysteriously during intense disk usage/RAID checks. It would only crash during the weekly RAID integrity check. ThenI noticed during a reboot that not all CPUs were being brought up, as a result this actually creates much higher temperatures with the output I got from sensors, just booting the system produced higher than normal temperatures. You can imagine that a full blown RAID check........

updatedb/mdadm caused a kernel panic?

Jan 16 04:02:03 centosbox syslogd 1.4.1: restart. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: INFO: task updatedb:20771 blocked for more than 300 seconds. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: updatedb D F78BE050 6476 20771 20766&n........

mdadm/md-check how to check array integrity without rebuilding

This doesn't seem to be widely known (maybe it's in some documentation that none of us read though)but there's an easy way to check the integrity of any mdadm array: sudo echo check > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action -bash: /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action: Permission denied sudo will never work, this only works as root since echo is not actually a binary/command. It is built-into bash. /sys/devices/virtu........

md: data-check of RAID array md3

This really made me nervous but notice the mdstat says "check". This is because in Ubuntu there is a scheduled mdadm cronscript that runs everyday on Sunday at 00:57 that checks your entire array. This is a good way because it prevents gradual but unnoticed data corruption which Inever thought of. As long as the check completes properly you have peace of mind knowing that your data integretiy is assured and that your hard drives are functioning properly (I'........

WD EARS Advanced Format Can't be fixed?

There's no partial WD EARS alignment fix: I had data on /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 (RAID1) so I couldn't edit that one. I thought I'd be smart and try fixing the first two partitions so I set the first one starting at sector 2048 and then +8 for the second partition. This has really slowed the performance down worse than it ever was! Disk /dev/sda: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, tot........

vmare server - Cannot open the disk '/mnt/sda4/vmware/Debian/hdd.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: Failed to lock the file.

Go into the directory for your Virtual Machine and delete all ".lck" directories. rm -rf *.lck After that your server should boot.........

WD EARS/Green 2TB Cannot Disable Power Saving/Head Parking with hdparm

hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error The one thing you can do though is to set hdparm spindown time lower (it doesn't seem to work that well). -S set standby (spindown) timeout hdparm -S 251 /dev/sda /dev/sda: setti........

mdadm RAID 1 adventures

I separated the 2 drives in the RAID 1 array. 1 is the old one /dev/sda and is out of date, while the separated other one /dev/sdc was in another drive and mounted and used with more data (updated). I wonder how mdadm will handle this: usb-storage: device scan complete md: md127 stopped. md: bind md: md127: raid array is not clean -- starting background reconstruction raid1: raid set md127 active with 1 out of 2 m........

Ubuntu 10.04/GRUB2 mdadm won't boot

Moving to RAID was a pain. What you have to do is the following from an existing install: Install mdadm Create your mdadm RAID 1 array on your spare hard drive. Start it with the missing disk. rsync the entire contents of your current / to the md partition. Here's a good way of doing it: rsync -Pha --exclude=/proc/* --exclude=/sys/* --exclude=/mnt/* /. /mnt/md2........

Revert to GRUB 0.97/1 instead of GRUB2

had trouble trying to revert Ubuntu 10.04 LTS from grub2, won't boot mdraid and did not even install mdadm during the installation! I have tried moving back to GRUB 0.97 backed up original /boot and then copied /boot from an old Debian install. Modified device.map and menu.lst and put the appropriate kernels and initrd for Ubuntu back in /boot I ran grub: root (hd0,1) grub> setup (hd0) Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1........

mdadm Linux Software RAID QuickStart Guide

Create New RAID 1 Array: First setup your partitions (make sure they are exactly the same size) In my example I have sda3 and sdb3 which are 500GB in size. mdadm --create /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 mdadm: array /dev/md2 started. Check Status Of The Array *Note I already have other arrays md0 and md1. You can see below that md2 is syn........

How to Enable SMART on a device

smartctl -a -d ata -T permissive --smart=on /dev/sda -d ata is usually required for most SATA drives or you get an error. -T permissive is required if it's the first time you are running SMART on this device (it's not enough just to enable SMART in the BIOS) --smart=on is also required for the first time........

md: kicking non-fresh sda1 from array! - fix/solution

md: Autodetecting RAID arrays. md: autorun ... md: considering sdb1 ... md: adding sdb1 ... md: adding sda1 ... md: created md0 md: bind md: bind md: running: md: kicking non-fresh sda1 from array! md: unbind md: export_rdev(sda1) raid1: raid set md0 active with 1 out of 2 mirrors The md0 raid kicked sda1 ou........

mdadm when a RAID 1 member dies

[27969.398749] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 3907029168 512-byte hardware sectors (2000399 MB) [27969.398749] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [27969.398749] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [27969.398749] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [27972.117543] ata6.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [27972.117543] ata6.00: irq_stat 0x48000000 [27972.117543] ata6.00: cmd 60/08:00:ff:7........

mdadm "auto-read-only" Linux Software RAID solution

If you have the "(auto-read-only)" beside an arrayI have no idea why that happens but it is easy to fix. Just run "mdadm --readwrite /dev/md1" (rename md0 to the device with the problem and it will begin to resync. md1 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sdb2[0] sda2[1] 19534976 blocks [2/2] [UU] resync=PENDING ........

RAID 5 doomed in 2009?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/RAID-5-Doomed-2009,6525.html I found this article interesting, it basically says that with 2TB hard drives or larger sizes, you are more likely to encounter an unrecoverable read error. But is this just another Y2K doomsday? Don't HDD's have enough advanced hardware ECC error and read recovery to prevent this from happening? I'm almost tempted to build a 3 x........

mdadm: /dev/sda1 is too small: 0K - solution

I was creating a RAID array and got this error: mdadm: /dev/sda1 is too small: 0K mdadm: create aborted Of course sda1 is not too small, both partitions sda1 and sdb1 are identical in size: Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3 GB, 2000398934016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Sta........

mdadm can you downgrade the superblock?

Why would you want to downgrade the superblock? Old mdadm verisons like mdadm 2.5.6 only use the 0.90 superblock/metadata and new versions use 1,1.0,1.1 and 1.2 superblocks by default. There are some annoying caveats with this, first of all the new superblocks (later than 0.90) CANNOT be read by GRUB, so you won't even be able to install GRUB. Even worse, old versions of mdadm CANNOT automatically detect arrays even if they were created with a new version of mdadm with th........

Why does mdadm have two sets of UUID's?

Which one does the OS care about? blkid says the UUID is "787f1fa4-b010-4d77-a010-795b42884f56" while md insists its UUID is "4d96dd3b:deb5d555:7adb93cb:ce9182d9" When in doubt, do we assume the OS takes the one from blkid? /dev/md0: UUID="787f1fa4-b010-4d77-a010-795b42884f56" TYPE="ext3" [root@localhost ~]# mdadm -D /dev/md0 /dev/md0: Version : 0.90 &........

mdadm force/fix proper md127 name

I have an md0 arary that my Centos install refers to. I feel this is half the reason why it won't boot anymore. I saw the initrd for Centos was assembling it as md127 even though it was known as md0. The reason for this is because I used mdadm --assemble --scan to detect the array on a LiveCD. I had no idea this name would stick (but now I realize the name is permanently stored in the metadata once you mount md127 or whatever random name assemble gives it). W........

Debian 5.04 RAID 1 mdadm boot problem GRUB error

I successfully created a single RAID 1 partition which includes /boot inside it and my root directory through the Debian installer. It said GRUB installed successfully but when I try booting the OS it seems GRUB can't read anything. When trying to boot from GRUB GRUB Loading stage 1.5. GRUB loading, please wait... Error 2 I get "Error 2" when trying to boot Debian. I also notice from a LiveCD that........

Centos 5.5 RAID 1 boot issue

I installed 5.5 with a 300GB RAID 1 partition (boot is also on this partition). It booted up fine the first few times until after I used a Live CD and accessed the array, and it became named /dev/md127 for some reason. Now whenI boot into CentOS I get a kernel panic and different errors, once I got "invalid superblock", even though the array is fine (it didn't happen again, probably because I was sure to dismount and stop the mdadm array properly). Here's what........

Unixbench Score on Core i5 750 with OpenVZ Kernel vs Xen/Openvz

This was unbelievable how much the Xen kernel slows things down, keep in mind both tests were done on the hostnode, one was with the Openvz-Xen hybrid kernel and the other was just OpenVZ. You can see the performance difference is nearly 300% better when not using the Xen kernel. OpenVZ-Xen Kernel Test Results (I was wondering what was wrong/so slow with my Core i5!) # # # # # #&n........

chroot into an off-line Linux version using a LiveCD/USB

It's not just as simple as running the chroot command, you need to ensure the /proc and /dev entries are passed through and populated to the chroot environment. Step 1 - Mount Your Off-lineOS mount /dev/sda1 /mnt Step 2 - Mount Proc mount -t proc none /mnt/proc Step 3 - Mount Dev Most guides will tell you to use this: mount -o bind /dev /mnt//dev but that doesn't work for some reason in many cases: mount: wron........

mdadm Linux Software RAID auto-detect and assemble RAID Array

mdadm --assemble --scan mdadm: /dev/md/diaghost05102010:2 has been started with 2 drives. mdadm: /dev/md/diaghost05102010:1 has been started with 2 drives. mdadm: /dev/md/diaghost05102010:0 has been started with 2 drives. -bash-3.1# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [multipath] md125 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1] 14658185 blocks super 1.2........

Seagate 7200.11 firmware defect in 500GB, 1000GB (1TB) and 1500GB (1.5TB) Hard Drives

Seagate Inventory/Firmware Check I heard about this issue a long time ago but never looked into it. I figured I wasn't affected since my 500GB drives were running for so long. I've been using Seagate's since 2002 and to this day all of the drives I have are alive from Seagate. *Update the bad news is that I realize one of my 500GB's is about to die, it's not even a year old, but is also not affected by the recall according to Seagate! Seagate Inventory/Firm........

Convert HDD/Hard Drive Partition(s) into non-RAID into RAID 1 using existing data without data loss and without reformatting.

Before we start I take no responsibility for this, you should have a backup and if you make a mistake during this process you could wipe out all of your data. So backup somewhere else before starting this as a precaution, or make sure it's data you could afford to lose. The RAID 1 Setup (Hardware Wise) I've already setup my 2 x 1TB (Seagate) drives with identical partitions, make sure your new hard drive (the empty one) is setup like your curr........

Monitor MB/s Disk IO Usage/Bandwidth - Use iostat from the sysstat Package

The binary "iostat" comes from the package "sysstat" and is available on all Linux/Unix like platforms. Use the "-m" option to give you what you probably want, which is to see in MB/s how much bandwidth each disk is doing. iostat -m Linux 2.6.24.2 ((none)) 04/16/10 avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle ........

Linux EXT3 16GB-17GB maximum filesize issue solved/how to fix

I have no idea why but mkfs.ext3 defaults to a patheticlly small blocksize of 1024 bytes/1KB (kilobyte). That means the maximum filesize is ONLY 16GB! With 2KB/2048 bytes you get a 256 GB maximum filesize, and with 4KB/4096 bytes you get 2TB! I finally noticed/paid attention to this after realizing that with rsync and scp that no file larger than 17GB could be transferred. I then realized it must be a file size limit on the partition. Here is what tune2fs tol........

ntfs-3g Error/Fix/Solution - Unexpected sectors per cluster value (127). Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Invalid argument The device '/dev/sda1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a

./ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt -o force Unexpected sectors per cluster value (127). Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Invalid argument The device '/dev/sda1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around? This is happening on a system I've come across an HP 6930P running Windows XP Professional. The partition appears to be very norm........

Intel's Finnish Fetish

Intel's Finnish FetishIntel's Finnish Fetish By Dave Mock June 13, 2005 Chipmaker Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has successfully topped the personal computer market for decades. Breaking into related areas such as communications has been much difficult for the world's largest semiconductor maker. But a new partnership with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) could help to change that. Intel's forays into cellular-phone and home-entertaiment-device chips have........

How to Track Down/Find Cause of Linux high disk iowait/wa

top - 09:34:12 up 2 days, 20:57, 2 users, load average: 1.83, 1.99, 2.03 Tasks: 59 total, 2 running, 57 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 99.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st That 99.7% wa is iowait, it means the server is waiting for a process to complete an IOoperation or in plain English, there is a delay in........

OCFS2 crash

When trying to even cd or ls the mounted OCFS2 partition it crashes. Ithink this is a combination of VMWare Server's problem and the way I mounted and symlinked to it. More than anything this shows the problem and lack of forsight with VMWare, but also that OCFS2 is easily crashed if you do strange things. Output of /var/log/messages for OCFS2 Apr 10 15:57:45 localhost kernel: [84331.691258] Modules linked in: vmnet vmci vmmon ocfs2_stac........

Configuring OCFS2 Clustered File System on Debian Based Linux including Ubuntu and Kubuntu

There's a lot of information and guides on OCFS2 for RHELand Centos Linux but the package setup and configuration is slightly different and this has thrown some people off. Installing OC2FS You should install the following packages to get started: apt-get install ocfs2-tools ocfs2console Configure OC2FS In RHEL/Centos the main configuration file is located in /etc/sysconfig/o2cb However in Debian based Linux it is located........