Hi, I have got linux successfully booting from a raid5 whole disk set with / & /boot filesystems on that raid5 disk set. This is possible thanks to grub2 (with some hacking to make it install correctly.) The downside I found is that the system won't boot if the 1st disk is missing, as that contains the boot sector and core.img that grub requires to boot. The linux kernel also get unhappy about the partition table of the first disk saying the volume is larger then the geometry of the physical first disk. I was wondering if it was worth extending the md superblock to make it easier for booting raided whole disks. There are several ideas I had thought of that would make this achieveable: A first cylinder which needs to be mirrored across all the devices. This would be for the Volume/Master Boot record + Boot Sector Code. Grub2 bootsector + core.img should fit in here at (or least enough of it to bring grub up with the appropriate raid drivers.) We could include a dummy partition table with the whole disk in the 1st partition labeled as something like linux-raid (0xfd) or Non-FS data (0xda). The second cylinder has the md superblock and write intent bitmap, and the raid volume starts at the beginning of the 3rd cylinder. This would allow for this scheme to work with booting of all whole disk raid arrays of all levels using grub2, without any significant changes required in grub2. Thanks for the awesomeness that is linux software raid. -- Daniel Reurich Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd Ph 021 797 722 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
