Install questions with RAID

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2011-08-08 at 21:49 -0400, Alex wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm trying to install fedora15 and have questions about the disk
> installation procedures. I'm not really interested in using LVM, as I
> don't expect to ever need to grow or resize the disks or partitions.
> I'd like to create a RAID5 array from the four disks in the server.
> 
> I understand RAID isn't supported on the boot device.  Am I forced to
> install the boot loader on only one disk? What if that one disk
> becomes inaccessible?
> 
> If I have one partition on one disk that isn't part of a RAID volume,
> it's really going to make partitioning and general disk setup much
> more difficult, because all other partitions on all other disks will
> be part of a RAID5 volume.
----
I guess grub still can't boot from an md filesystem. Make a 500M
partition on each of the 4 drives as the first thing you do. Put /boot
on /dev/sda and leave the others blank/unused. Make the rest of your
partitions into your RAID 5 and your set. After everything is installed
and working, 

(as root)
mkdir /boot2
mount /dev/sdb1 /boot
rsync -rvup /boot/* /boot2
umount /boot2

mount /dev/sdc1 /boot
rsync -rvup /boot/* /boot2
umount /boot2

mount /dev/sdd1 /boot
rsync -rvup /boot/* /boot2
umount /boot2

This way, if /dev/sda takes a dump, you'll have to boot a rescue disk,
chroot to /mnt/sysimage and 'grub-install /dev/sda' (because when you
remove /dev/sda, another will take it's place). But that's not very
difficult.

Suggest that you do RAID 0 + 1 or RAID 6 (if that's possible in
Anaconda). Big hard drives are cheap these days, RAID 0 + 1 gives you
speed and reliability. If speed and reliability are not your thing, then
RAID 6 is a much better choice than RAID 5.

Craig