Linux Software Raid 1 Recovery Question

[Kent Borg]

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!  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.


-kb, the Kent who (reasonably) wants his bootable software raid to be
able to boot off of either of the redundant disks.