SOLVED: Fedora won't boot with second NTFS HDD installed

[nixel]

Well, I'm new to Linux, so maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it seems weird.
If it's too much text, it's save to skip down to the bold text. 

Fedora and HDA are installed on a 120GB SSD drive, which I want to use as a System drive only. In case I need to reinstall Fedora and HDA easily, just formatting this one SSD and installing fresh os. 

It's working great.

But then I tried to install a 1TB NTFS drive. At first it did not even boot into OS, with tocblock error. I figured it could've been because of that disk being Dynamic. I sighed, ok, no biggie. Using windows PC I moved all the data (thankfully there is not much on this one) out from the disk and formatted it into NTFS (because I still want it to be easily compatible with windows). With just one partition. I put a few files on it, just for testing purposes.

Now, HDD is back in Fedora\Amahi machine. And still it won't boot. The error is gone, but there is no another one. Can't copy paste it, so ill write some thnigs:

Code: Select all

ata14.00: exception Emask 0x1 SAct 0x0 Serr 0x0 action 0x0 irq_stat 0x40000001 Inquity 12 XXXXXXXXXX (device error) someting about HSM violation Startic Dracut Emergency Shell... Warning: /dev/sda3 does not exist

Weird. Ok, I unplugged the sata cable from that HDD and reboot. Fedora booted up without problem. I plugged SATA cable in. It automatically found the drive and mounted it after I entered a password. All files there. No problem. Mounted as sdb5 I think.

Then I unmounted it and ran this command:
hda-diskmount

As it suggested I put the line into fstab file. Reboot... Same error as above.

How do I approach this problem? How do I install more drives into Fedora\Amahi machine? What about hardware bios RAID setups? 

In the end I want to have a setup similar to this:
120GB EXTn System Drive
1TB NTFS preferred Data drive for music and books and small stuff
4TB NTFS preferred Data drive for movies and series. I do have a drive already with a lot of data, whic hI don't want to lose or move
4TB+4TB NTFS preferred, Motherboard controlled (not software) RAID 1 for SVN, photo archive and other sensitive data.

NTFS is highly preferred on those drives, because I want to be able in case of emergency or other needs to just pull the HDD out of Amahi, and plug it into a rack in my main windows pc. From what I gathered it's easier to work with NTFS in Linux, that EXT in Windows.

Thanks. Sorry for a lot of text again. I'm just once again really frustrated, that I can't find the information about this. Everything is usually about totally different setups and mounting problems, nothing specific to similar cases.

[bigfoot65]

You should check out the adding a second hard drive to your HDA guidance. There may be some Fedora packages that you need to install. Also drives are not automatically mounted. You can use the disk-wizard App as well, but I prefer the manual method.

From what I gathered it's easier to work with NTFS in Linux, that EXT in Windows.

Not that big of deal anymore. There are free utilities that allow you to access Linux file system in Windows.

BTW, there is a lot of guidance in the Amahi wiki.

[nixel]

Ok, the problem was not with how I installed that HDD but because I removed it after I put it into fstub. It was an empty secondary hdd, but Fedora just won't boot until I put it back.

Is there a way to hot-swap HDDs in Fedora\Amahi? Without making OS unusable like this?
for example: in Windows I can just pull the Sata cable out (just a drastic example, I strong advise against doing it of course  , unless it's  a special rack for HDDs), and it will still work, and boot and reboot for years  But Linux just broke when I pulled out a SECONDARY non system drive, which was mounted to folder...

Is that the case, or is it just something with my setup again?

Thanks. 

[bigfoot65]

for example: in Windows I can just pull the Sata cable out (just a drastic example, I strong advise against doing it of course , unless it's a special rack for HDDs), and it will still work, and boot and reboot for years

Yes Windows is quite good about that. Unfortunately Linux is not. If you remove a drive, you have to remove it from the /etc/fstab file first.

So to remove the drive, remove it from the file first. Then shutdown, disconnect it and the machine should boot.

[nixel]

Thanks. Well, I guess I'll just have to deal with that. At least if I won't get locked away from recovery console, it should be simple to fix one file.

But... I know it's not quite the right place to ask, but any news or rumors about whether this is ever going to be enhanced in linux?

[bigfoot65]

Sorry but I have no idea.

This is more a limitation of a headless server. A Linux desktop distribution would probably work similar to Windows. Not many run a server with a desktop though.

Microsoft has everything pretty much plug-n-play. Linux not so much and that is one of the reasons many don't use Linux. If you want simple and easy, Linux is probably not a good fit for you.

I presume we can mark this one as solved.

[nixel]

Well, in fact running most stuff like nas and servers, setting up complilers and similar stuff is easier done with linux.

I am not worried about how hard it may be to unmount a drive. I'm worried about how secure and safe it is. If I lose one drive due to, say, power outage or something... Of course I am worried about whether I will have to reinstall linux or not, and how much time I will have to spend trying to fix it. I mean it's a home server. If it takes a day, ok but still too much. If it takes weeks, i'm sorry, I have other work to do. Even though I like tinkering with this stuff.

Yes, this one is solved. thanks again.

[bigfoot65]

If I lose one drive due to, say, power outage or something... Of course I am worried about whether I will have to reinstall linux or not, and how much time I will have to spend trying to fix it.

If a drive crashes and the server boots into Emergency mode, you can remove the affected drive from the /etc/fstab file and reboot.

Had to do this once and it worked fine for me. Should be no reason to reinstall.

BTW, you can install a package to monitor hard drive status and receive email alerts when a drive is failing. See the disk error alerts for details.