>> Thanks for the explanation! >> There should be an option in the GRUB configuration to do this, so >> that the RAID won't get overwritten the next time I do a grub-install, >> I think. > > That would make my life a lot easier! On the other hand, the most > straight forward thing to do would be to move the stage 1.5 to another > default sector. So you can not forget to set any option that ruins your > array if missing. Also there is no need to add some autodetection code > for hpt controllers then. One step ahead of me, you are. I was just thinking of doing autodetection of HPT magic in GRUB. The autodetection has a plus side too, though. It can detect other stuff that should not be touched (Windows/Veritas dynamic partition information comes to mind?) and not touch sectors based on what is actually there on a particular system. Would perhaps save the implementor the pain of choosing once there's just too many reserved sectors and the stage1.5 loader wont fit. I think I've read that the stage1.5 loader is not really necessary in some cases, think I'll go doc-hunting. >> Or even better, dmraid could protect the metadata blocks by some magic >> flag to dm-mod. >> This isn't possible as is, is it? > > One can make any I/O to this block fail. But I would like something like > discarding any writes and only perform reads. "dd" backups would still > work then. Right. And perhaps a user-definable flag to turn the protection on or off :-). Is it possible without adding new code to dm-mod?
