You still have to have some part of your boot process served by normal startup support (like a hardware raid / motherboard supported fakeraid; unless you're doing some kind of netboot) no matter what you do you still need a kernel exposed, and you may as well have an initrd of some kind after it. What I'd likely do is use GPT and place your bootloader inside of a Guid Partition Table area (preferably near the front of the disk so you're assured to be within realmode bios LBA range (just in case LBA 48 bit isn't supported by your bootloader/bios) which might end at 128GB of data http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-301826.html) and set it up so that the boot-loader code in the first 440 (446) bytes of the MBR compatibility/protective label loads the blocks for the real bootloader from that area. Then you can use DD to duplicate the first 446 bytes on to each other 'mirror' device and either have those boot devices as a mirror set, or intentionally only manually update the backups when you've tested a new kernel. < Free Open Source Plug > If for some reason your current distribution's initrd/initramfs doesn't do what you want, I know of an easily customized alternative: "Another Early Userspace Init Option" http://sourceforge.net/projects/aeuio/ which is based on basic /bin/sh , awk, sed ; it builds best when you have a local copy of busybox, but should also build (a somewhat larger) initrd using the other binaries on your system. -- 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
