[Grml] Is accessing striped "dynamic disks" from GRML possible?

[Michael Schierl]

[Resend, since first time something (most probably my fingers) ate the
CC: to the list]

Ulrich Dangel schrieb:

<offtopic>

>  oh and you can also "mount" disks to some directorys...

But you should not try to move nonempty folders from there to the
recycle bin, since this fails here regularly. And, running "Sysinternals
Rootkit Revealer" will find lots of MFT inconsistencies if you use
volume junctions on a NTFS drive to "mount" FAT32 drives (which allows
you to assign ACLs to the whole drive by assigning them to the volume
junction). This has been reported as a bug some time ago, but I did not
get any answer.

</offtopic>

> Try the link above and build it on you're own. 

Building that worked. I set up a test system in a VM where I formatted 2
"dynamic disks" and created spanned and striped volumes between them
(mirrored is trivial since you can just mount one of the mirrors
readonly). To make it a bit more complicated, I created a partition in
the "middle" of the second disk so that the "second part" of the stripes
and mirrors got split into two "partitions" each:

-----
Stripe1 Size: 0x001FD800 (1019 MB)
    Stripe1-01
      Disk1-01   VolumeOffset: 0x00000000 Offset: 0x00000000
           Length: 0x000FEC00
      Disk2-02   VolumeOffset: 0x00000000 Offset: 0x0007F800
           Length: 0x0007F800
      Disk2-04   VolumeOffset: 0x0007F800 Offset: 0x0017E800
           Length: 0x0007F400
Volume1 Size: 0x001FE000 (1020 MB)
    Volume1-01
      Disk1-02   VolumeOffset: 0x00000000 Offset: 0x000FEC00
           Length: 0x000FF000
      Disk2-03   VolumeOffset: 0x0017E800 Offset: 0x00000000
           Length: 0x0007F800
      Disk2-01   VolumeOffset: 0x000FF000 Offset: 0x000FF000
           Length: 0x0007F800
-----

Volume1 worked well like this:

----
0       1044480 linear /dev/hda2 0
1044480  522240 linear /dev/hdb3 0
1566720  522240 linear /dev/hdb1 0
----

Stripe1 was a bit more tricky, since I forgot to double the length for
the striped parts first, so I always got I/O errors. This one worked:

----
0       1044480 striped 2 128 /dev/hda1      0 /dev/hdb2 0
1044480 1042432 striped 2 128 /dev/hda1 522240 /dev/hdb4 0
----

But: What calculator to use in grml for all that hex/decimal conversions
(and multiplications and additions)? There is no orpie (great console
RPN calculator) and GNU Calculator for Emacs is not there either. Okay,
dc/bc is there, but I don't know (and could not figure out by grepping
the man page) how they can handle hex numbers...

> I've just build a .deb for this package, you can get it from
> http://schu.la/grml/dynamic-disk_0.8-1_i386.deb 
> Note: I didnt test it, because i dont have any windows partitions right
> here. Hope that helps someone

libgcc and libstdc++ are too old when "dpkg -i"-ing it from the
grml-0.8 CD. Thanks anyway.

Michael