format raid with ext3

[sonun]

I have added a new riad to the server striped with raid 5. I want to format the filesystem with ext3. The os is Redhat 7.2.
So, first step,
fsck /dev/sda
The only scsi device on the server is the raid (I think !!) and so I thought I should do fsck /dev/sda, but it says,
device not found.
Now, when I connected the device and booted the machine, kudzu detected it and configured it.
I am not sure what the device is. So what should I do now??
The steps I thought I had to go through was,
after fsck /dev/sda,
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda,
e2label /dev/sda /mount/point
then add a entry in fstab as,
LABEL=/mount/point /mount/point ext3 defaults 1 2

Please advise. Am I missing any steps ?? Please coorect me if I am wrong anywhere. But first, why is the fsck not working ?? How do I detect the device ??

Thanks.

 

[sonun]

I am sorry.
But its,
fdisk /dev/sda and not fsck /dev/sda.
I mean thats what I did when I got the message,
Unable to open /dev/sda
ditto for /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc ...
Thanks.

 

[jrjuiliano]

I *could* be wrong, but I don't think you can run fsck on a RAID array, since it is comprised of more than one disk. You can, however, do an fsck on an individual disk.

to find the individual disk names I think you can do "cat /proc/mdstat" and see the devices there. Then check individually.

As far as checking to make sure all the steps are there, check out this link:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-raid1/?dwzone=linux

It has a good lot of information for you to mull over!

HTH J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group

 

[jrjuiliano]

Sorry, just re-read this post. I know you meant to format the drives...

Each individual drive needs to be partitioned anyway.

Then formatting is just a case of using mk2efs -j /dev/<whatever your raid device name is> and it should format the entire array as you need it.

Now I guess the question to also ask -- do you have SCSI support in your kernel? J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group