The problem is that fasttrak doesn't have an option for jbod, or normal ide mode. For what ever reason promise does give you an option to create a normal drive in their bios menu. As odd as it sounds you can create a raid0 array with one drive. Trust me it works despite being completely wrong in so many ways. In fact I think it will let you create a mirror with one drive as well.
Ahh - that's worked! I can now boot off either disk. Thanks Samuel.
I'm now trying to test the procedure for adding a replacement disk to the array, but the documentation on this is pretty skimpy. I'm actually mildly shocked by this - the section on "Reconstruction" in the Software RAID Howto is bordering on the comic, and there's no documentation at all for mdadm, it seems. So I'll see if this works:
http://www.e-smith.org/docs/howto/RAID-recovery-howto.html
There really are far to many unmaintained howtos floating around.
At least it has a date on it...
It's really quite easy to replace a drive.
1)Just create the same partition layout on the new drive. You just want to do this*: `fdisk -d /dev/hde > /etc/hde.sfdisk` `fdisk -d /dev/hdg > /etc/hdg.sfdisk` then if hdg fails `sfdisk /dev/hdg < /etc/hdg.sfdisk`
2)Do a 'raidhotadd /dev/md(array number) /dev/hd(partition number) for each array. Look in /etc/raidtab for details on what maps to what.
*Personally I'm really lazy so I do this :
dd if=/dev/gooddrive of=/dev/replacementdrive count=1024
echo "w" |fdisk /dev/replacementdrive
(copy the partition table from the good drive to the new drive, and use fdisk to force linux to reread the partition table.)
-- Unless you can't avoid it never put a serial number on any of your systems!! (The Numberless Rule of Hardware Acquisition) Sam Flory <sflory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
