[Techtalk] booting Linux software RAID

[Conor Daly]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2004 at 01:30:33PM -0700 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Carla Schroder thought:
> 
> 2. Put your root filesystem and bootdir/partition on the RAID disks, and 
> compile support into the kernel, to start it at boot time.

Number 2 for me.  I set up / and /home on two 40Gb disks running raid 1.
/dev/md1 is /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdc1
/dev/md3 is /dev/hda3 and /dev/hdc3
/dev/hd(a|c)2 is swap

It needs:

initrd with raid support (mkinitrd)
LILO installed on both /dev/hda and /dev/hdc with individualised map
files.  This caught me out the first few times 'cos the same map in use
for both MBAs caused LI hangs if one disk was disconnected.  

I had a few interesting times with this about a year ago.  I wrote some of
it up somewhere on:  http://www.cod.utvinternet.com if you want to go have
a look.  There should be sample lilo.conf , scripts to absorb a new disk
into the raid, stuff...

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
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