Instruct Hetzner installimage to use SSD as primary OS drive

Question

Purchased a dedicated Hetzner server with 2x small SSDs and 2x large HDDs paired with hardware RAID. Running installimage from Rescue OS shows this as config:

# Adaptec RAID (LD 0): no name
DRIVE1 /dev/sda
# Adaptec RAID (LD 1): no name
DRIVE2 /dev/sdb
...

Lower down, it shows,

## your system has the following devices:
#
# Disk /dev/sda: 749 GB (=> 697 GiB).
# Disk /dev/sdb: 119 GB (=> 111 GiB).

I set SWRAID 0. How do I tell the script to mount the SSD pair as the primary drive for installing the OS?

My first attempt was to swap the DRIVEx statements around, which resulted in this on Debian:

root@Debian-90-stretch-64-minimal / # lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda       8:0    1   698G  0 disk
|-sda1    8:1    1    12G  0 part
| `-md0   9:0    0    12G  0 raid1 [SWAP]
|-sda2    8:2    1   512M  0 part
| `-md1   9:1    0 511.4M  0 raid1 /boot
`-sda3    8:3    1  99.1G  0 part
  `-md2   9:2    0    99G  0 raid1 /
sdb       8:16   1 111.6G  0 disk
|-sdb1    8:17   1    12G  0 part
|-sdb2    8:18   1   512M  0 part
`-sdb3    8:19   1  99.1G  0 part

As you can see the SSDs are a on sdb and the larger 698GB HDDs are on sda, but sda is not fully partitioned. It feels like potentially the drives are incorrectly paired.

What do you want to swap? Just use `/dev/sdb` as installation disk. — Lenniey, Jul 11 '17 at 12:21
There is a documentation https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Installimage/en. This is the important part: Drives The drives that are present in the server are identified in the first row with the variable DRIVE. Above each line you can see the type of drive. Here you can select on which drives you want the OS to be installed. The drives will be completely wiped, and all data currently on them will be lost. `# SSDSC2BB480G4 #DRIVE1 /dev/sda # SSDSC2BB480G4 DRIVE1 /dev/sdb` — Lenniey, Jul 11 '17 at 13:06
Thanks @Lenniey, but I can't figure out how to specify which physical drive to install the OS on. — Petrus Theron, Jul 25 '17 at 09:14

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 11 '17 at 14:14

0

If the box is still "clean" maybe you could remove your two raid arrays and recreate them so the ssd-array is the first one.

There is sufficient documentation on how to do this using arcconf on https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Adaptec_RAID_Controller

answered Jul 11 '17 at 14:14

Andreas Rogge

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If you need further assistance I'll need the output of `arcconf GETCONFIG 1 LD` – Andreas Rogge Jul 11 '17 at 14:15
This would be the "beautiful" solution. But it's quite the hassle, too. If there's no need to switch the disks `sdb/sda` I wouldn't do it. – Lenniey Jul 11 '17 at 14:52
I guess the box will boot from sda, so you'll have to put your bootloader there. – Andreas Rogge Jul 11 '17 at 19:47
Could be, yes. I sure hope they set both RAIDs as bootable and have both volumes in BIOS ;) – Lenniey Jul 12 '17 at 07:13

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 26 '18 at 20:29

You should remove one of the discs from the config.

If you want to leave a drive in its current state and not make any changes to it you can leave it out (remove it) by placing a "#" before it. Please note that doing so means that the number after the next DRIVE variable must be properly adjusted.

Otherwise, all 4 physical disks will be in one raid massive:

Any software RAID levels are always applied to all (marked with DRIVE, as discussed above) drives. If you don't want a software RAID on a particular drive, you'll need to remove it accordingly.

Later, after system installation, you can format and mount second raid massive

https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Installimage/en

Instruct Hetzner installimage to use SSD as primary OS drive

2 Answers2