Install / as RAID 0

[Richard Shaw]

I got some very old computers (Pentium 4) and quite frankly it's choking on
the installer (40 minutes to draw a window to setup partitions), but since
it's a system I don't care about I wanted to experiment with RAID since
I've never done so before.

To make setting up the partitions easier I used System Rescue CD which
boots up and is usable within a reasonable amount of time. The systems came
with 80GB drives so I move one over and setup the partition layout is as
follows:

/dev/sda1 /boot 4GB (too big, but I want it to match partition 1 on sdb)
/dev/sda2 RAID 0 (remainder)
/dev/sdb1 SWAP 4GB
/dev/sdb2 RAID 0 (remainder)

I setup the RAID 0 with mdadm... I still don't know exactly what I'm doing
but I ended up using the LXDE spin because Gnome Live was unusable.
Sometimes the installer sees /dev/md0 and sometimes it doesn't (shows 0
bytes available).

The one time I got through the partitioning using bivlet it complained
about /dev/sdb1 and wouldn't show OK on the main screen, but that's SWAP,
why does it care? If I don't select both drives it won't let me setup
/dev/md0.

Yesterday I tried installing Bodhi linux, I would rather stay with Fedora
or at least something RPM based but it seemed to run decently and the
installer recognized /dev/md0 (after I did an apt install mdadm which
auto-created /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf) and let me install to it.

However... One I rebooted it dropped into busybox. I assume this is either
because /etc is on root so it can't see it OR I need to recreate the initrd
with the right kernel module? Not sure and I haven't been able to find good
instructions for root as RAID... Probably not a good idea, but it's a trash
system so I was just playing with it anyway.

Ideas?

Thanks,
Richard