Neil, you wouldn't believe it! I got it working! Here's what I did: I got to the Grub menu, hit "e" to temporarily edit my menu entry, and added "break=premount" to the kernel (linux) line. This causes Linux to drop you to a recovery shell before the real root is mounted (still in the initial ramdisk). From there I did "mdadm -R /dev/md127". That started /dev/md127. Then I entered "exit" to continue the booting process. Once fully booted, /dev/md127 no longer was active, even though I got it active in the pre-mount environment. >From a "regular" (after the real root is mounted) environment, I ran "sudo mdadm -R /dev/md127". This resulted in: mdadm: failed to run array /dev/md127: Invalid argument Then I restarted without doing a break, and "sudo mdadm -R /dev/md127" resulted with the same error as last time. Then I re-created the raid device with: sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md127 (note that the file /dev/md127 still exists, it's just stopped, which I find interesting.) sudo mdadm --create /dev/md127 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda2 missing Then I stopped all devices: sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md127 (I only had that one device. I probably could have done "sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md* if I really wanted to wipe them all out, if I had more.) Then I renamed mdadm to mdadm.moved: sudo mv /sbin/mdadm /sbin/mdadm.moved Then I restarted: sudo shutdown -r 0 And my ramdisk hybrid raid device was up and running after startup! One time I didn't stop /dev/md127 and restarted. That corrupted it. I remade it, and as long as I stopped the device before shutdown, I was good. Going into the pre-mount environment does not seem to be needed to make it _NOT_ corrupted, but I wanted to tell the story how it was. I changed fstab to use the raid device for /usr (specifying by uuid!), added "/sbin/mdadm.moved --stop /dev/md*" very early in /etc/rc.shutdown, and added "/sbin/mdadm.moved /dev/disk/by-uuid/[uuid of my hybrid md device] -a /dev/ram0" to /etc/rc.local. And now it works! Yey!!!! Thanks so much Neil Brown and Mr. Green and all y'all! Super Cheers, Jake -- 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
