software raid

[Vu Pham]

Vu Pham wrote:
[...]
> My RHEL server, using GRUB, has /boot on raid-1. Disk Druid told me if I 
> set up /boot on RAID, then only RAID-1 can be used.
> 
> 
> Grub config shows
>         root (hd0,0)
>         kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.el5PAE ro root=/dev/md2 rhgb quiet
>         initrd /initrd-2.6.18-53.el5PAE.img
> 
> so I think the boot-loader, at boot time, just loads the kernel as if it 
> is in a normal ext3 partition

To test that theory, I removed the first hard drive of the software 
raid-1 that has /boot. The system was still  working fine at that moment 
and mdadm did report that problem. But when I rebooted the system, the 
whole system just crashed right at GRUB.

 From that test, I think that for sfotware-raid-1 /boot partition,  raid 
works only after the kernel is loaded ( and the raid driver is loaded ). 
At boot time, just the first disk of that raid-1 to be used as a 
non-raid disk because no raid driver exists at that moment.

Vu