RAID1 New Install

[Radjin]

I am creating a new box. Inside I have two 1TB SSD’s. Is there a step by step guide to creating a RAID1 and installing Buster?

I am looking for two disks to be RAID1:
1. Interchangeable
2. Bootable
3. Auto-switching, should one fail.
4. Self-rebuilding should one be replaced.

It will be a software raid.

The system will be installed using a USB drive with a Debian install image, I hope.

I have some experience with Linux having run a Debian box almost 15 years ago, but it was only a simple web server, so please be gentle...

Thank you in advance...
Radjin~

[Bloom]

Do NOT use the software RAID built in the pc's BIOS. That will be incompatible with Debian with a very high degree of certainty.
The installation procedure of Debian should allow you to specifiy that you want to use the two hard disks in RAID-1, partition that RAID-volume according to your whishes and format all the partitions.
Note that you cannot use the hard disk partitioning wizard to automatically create and format everything, because it can't know how you would like to use the disks.
It is best that you create a partition table (gpt or msdos depending on the size of the hard disks and your preference) outside of the Debian installation. Use a Debian Live disk and its GPartEd to do that, or a GPartEd Live disc.
Then create on each disk a RAID-partition. If you start the installer then, it will see the two RAID-partitions and suggest using them in RAID-0 or RAID-1 en present them to you as one volume in which to partition a root, a swap, and possibly a separate home (which I do).

[Radjin]

Thank you for that... I had just found the RAID option in the bios and was reading how to set it up. I know you said NOT to use it but you left a small possibility of it working. Should I try it (it works or not) or are there other incompatibilities that may present themselves later?

[Bloom]

Nono, don't use the internal RAID setup. It is incompatible with Linux because you need drivers that only come for Windows and not for Linux.
Use the Debian RAID setup like I explained in my previous message.

[Radjin]

OK OK, I get the urgency. Would a standard live image on a USB stick contain GPartEd?

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... so-hybrid/

To be sure; a live image allows me to boot and run from my USB drive as well as install to the system drives?

[Bloom]

Yes, if it doesn't you can simply install it. Since the Debian Live disc doesn't have any persistent storage (unlike the one from Ubuntu), the amount of space to do such things is very limited. But I could manage to install all necessary software for managing RAID arrays (mdadm and such), JFS volumes (my preferred filesystem) and GParted (normally already present) without problem. Doing an update and upgrade will NOT work, there's not enough room for that.

[Radjin]

So the standard image should work.

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... d.packages

[Radjin]

I cannot find an image with GParted and I cannot add it to the live disk.

[Bloom]

Then you seem to be incapable of using google?
Voilà: https://gparted.org/liveusb.php

[Radjin]

Yes, I don’t use google for anything; too hard to weed through all the ads and wait on the trackers to bother. I did find the same page, but it was not clear to me which I needed to select.

I don’t see a closed or resolved but I did get it working.

Appreciate your help.

Radjin~

[Bloom]

Instead of Google, you can use https://duckduckgo.com. No ads, no logging, no privacy invasions.

[Radjin]

Exactly what I use.