Dear List I am trying to make a bootable floppy / CD that will mount my software RAID 5 and have been grappling with this issue for three weeks without success. My setup (/etc/fstab): /dev/md0 / reiserfs defaults 1 1 /dev/sda1 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/sdb1 /data1 ext2 noauto,user 0 0 /dev/sdc1 /data2 ext2 noauto,user 0 0 /dev/sda2 swap swap pri=42 0 0 /dev/sdb2 swap swap pri=42 0 0 /dev/sdc2 swap swap pri=42 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0 /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0 /dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0 # autogenerated /etc/raidtab by YaST2 raiddev /dev/md0 raid-level 5 nr-raid-disks 3 nr-spare-disks 0 persistent-superblock 1 parity-algorithm left-symmetric chunk-size 128 device /dev/sda3 raid-disk 0 device /dev/sdb3 raid-disk 1 device /dev/sdc3 raid-disk 2 Basically, /dev/md0 is made up of /dev/sd[a-c]3. I have discovered that as of 8.0, you can no longer create a boot floppy as the images will no longer fit on a floppy (per http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/kgw_bootdisketten.html). However, I cannot use the article's advice to simply create a LILO boot floppy because LILO does not recognise RAID partitions - editing lilo.conf to boot from /dev/md0 will result in a kernel panic. The only way I can get anything to boot at the moment is use LILO to mount /boot, which is an ext2 partition on /dev/sda1. My problem is - what if the first disk in the RAID 5 array fails? I cannot simply hot plug a drive and expect it to boot without recreating the /boot partition on that drive. Ideally, the entire /boot partition should be able to reside on the boot floppy or boot CD so that the only partitions I need to create on the drives are the RAID (and swap) partitions. Does anyone know of any way to get /boot onto a bootable CD that will then proceed to mount / as /dev/md0? I am not able to do this from LILO directly without a kernel panic. And the GRUB documentation specifically says that it does not support RAID. Any suggestions? Your feedback would be very much appreciated. Thank you and regards Luke Loh Senior Network Engineer Nicholls-Price Pty Ltd Mb: 0412 022 311 Ph : 61 2 9222 9155 Fx : 61 2 9222 9166 www.nph.com.au Level 1, 70 Pitt Street Sydney NSW 2000