Linux Software Raid 1 Recovery Question

[ron.peterson at yellowbank.com]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 03:09:27PM -0400, Kent Borg wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 02:56:07PM -0400, ron.peterson at yellowbank.com wrote:
> > How did you write the boot loader to the MBR?  
> 
> Red Hat's 7.3 installer wrote it originally.  To recover my array
> after playing with Mandrake I used the lilo inside my Red Hat install
> to rewrite it.
> 
> On my co-worker's machine we have tried both the RH 7.3 lilo and the
> newer lilo on the Knoppix CD.
> 
> > If your BIOS supports booting off hdc (?), then lilo.conf would have
> > to be edited to reflect that (boot=/dev/hdc, root=/dev/hdc3, etc.).
> 
> Ah, but here is where the fact of raid confuses things.  I have
> "boot=/dev/md6" and "root=/dev/md5" in the lilo.conf!

Oops, forgot about that.  I just went and looked at the lilo.conf on a
running software raid system, and have:

boot=/dev/sda
image=/vmsomethingorother
  root=/dev/md2

Otherwise, like you say, how could the system find md stuff before there
is a kernel.

But you were sucessfully booting before...  (?)

I dunno.

>  These are the
> meta-devices created by the software raid 1 (under the meta-device is
> a /dev/hda partition and a /dev/hdc partition).  I don't expect that
> lilo knows how to start up raid, that somehow the kernel is boot
> strapping it.  But how did lilo find the kernel?  I don't yet
> understand.  These are complicated regions, I say.

-- 
Ron Peterson                   -o)
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