Richard Creighton wrote:
I have not been able to find how to do this DURING INSTALLATION. I can create the software array but I am warned that it will NOT be bootable nor can a MBR be created nor can a swap partition be created because until the boot is complete, the software array is not available/stable. That is the warning message I get (and heed). I can install to a 5th drive and create the array, but this is a 5 drive solution to a 4 drive problem.
I have a bootable RAID1 (software raid). GRUB looks at the drives for the initrd to load the raid1 module. Do you have the raid45 module in your initrd modules?
Any ideas on how to use the 'fake-raid' during the install AS A BOOT DEVICE would be appreciated. I think the main limitation is GRUB, as it needs to be able to access /boot/grub, meaning it has to be able to read the disk. It cannot load a driver from the very drive it needs the driver for to be able to read. It is simple with boot on your IDE drive. As I stated, I can't see how to use it as the root device or boot device, only as a data device.
Root on the array is no problem, but it is definitely easiest to have boot (and therefore the kernel, initrd, and /boot/grub/*) on a GRUB natively reachable drive. On my system (only raid 1, including boot), GRUB sees the individual drives when looking for boot, i.e. /dev/hda5. So once it has found boot, it can load everything it needs to load root on the raid1. If GRUB can see the individual drive, i.e. sdax of the array to read boot, it would probably work, but may be too complicated for the tools. In other words, if your boot was on your array, if you knew which disk actually has boot so you can give GRUB the location in a way it can see, i.e. sda2 or whatever, it should work, but may need manual config (i.e. I have had better success from the GRUB command line to install on the MBR of a particular drive, looking for boot on a particular drive, even though in menu.lst the root dev is md0). HTH. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.2 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org