Forget Raid

[Les Mikesell]

Karl Larsen wrote:

>>>    I was sent a good paper by John Urish in 2006 titled Software 
>>> RAID-1 and it is VERY GOOD :-)
>>>
>>>    It is complete and it tells me how to rewrite grub.conf, fstab and 
>>> initrd so my computer can boot and work with raid :-(
>>>
>>>    Forget it. I am not this interested in RAID!
>>
>> You don't need to do anything to initrd for raid-1. Since the 
>> underlying  partition is almost the same as a non-raid filesystem, you 
>> can pretend that each /boot is a stand-alone partition as far as 
>> booting goes. There are some tricks to make the 2nd drive boot if the 
>> 1st fails, but on IDE it's probably not worth the trouble because most 
>> disk failure modes will hang the machine until you remove it - and at 
>> that point you might as well swap the mirror into the 1st position, 
>> boot the rescue CD, and reinstall grub.  Still beats restoring from a 
>> backup and losing a day's work.
>>
>    The guys paper assured me that I will not boot again without all 
> those changes if I make my current partition fd. There is so much yes 
> and no about things I can't and do not want to learn by bitter experience.

I don't know what all the changes are, but you don't need a new initrd 
unless you are switching to a different disk controller.  You do need 
grub installed on the new drive, thinking that it is booting from the 
individual partition holding one of the /boot mirrors and
mounting root from the new /dev/md? device.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com