On Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:49:40 -0500 Baho Utot <baho-utot@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
[...]
All your tries with the "new methos" thus just failed, because you copied /etc/mdadm.conf too late, and it was never added to the initrd file. Mdadm inside the ramfs just never knew what to look for.
Only if you use the madam hook, I use just the raid and encryption hook and it works for me.
I am using raid5 with encrypted root and home filesystems (on the Arch install) , everything is encrypted except /boot ( it is not mounted into the filesystem and is not in fstab )
Yes, I was mostly implying use of the mdadm hook. I personally don't like overly long boot lines in grub. I have no idea why the "raid" hook also failed for others, I haven't used it in a long time.
[...]
Let me suggest you have a look at the raid howto on slackware12.2 or 13.0 dvd.
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/slackware-13.0/README_RAID.TXT
Slack uses lilo but if you define the array on the kernel line in grub it works just the same.
/boot/grub/menu.lst
timeout 5 default 41 color green/black light-green/blue
title ArchLinux x86_64 root (hd0,1) kernel /vmlinuz26 cryptdevice=/dev/md2:root root=/dev/mapper/root md=2,/dev/sda5,/dev/sdb5,/dev/sdc5 ro initrd /kernel26.img AFAIK the md=2,... line is read by the 'raid' hook to assemble the raids via mdadm command line.
title Slackware 12.2-x86 root (hd0,1) kernel /Slackware/vmlinuz root=/dev/md2 md2=,/dev/sda5,/dev/sdb5,/dev/sdc5
Notice no initrd in the above I'm not entirely sure, *how* the system manages to find raid-members and assembles them in this cases. A while ago there was a kernel-level raid auto detection which is marked as deprecated and advised against in favor of userspace raid assembly via initrd. Perhaps Slackware is still using this feature. It didn't work for me either on gentoo or arch though. This would indicate, that the md=2,... line is superfluous in this case.
Here is /etc/mdadm.conf from Slack and the Arch install has an empty file for /etc/mdadm.conf.
Please read the second paragraph, closely read the functioning of madm without a configuration file.
# mdadm configuration file # # mdadm will function properly without the use of a configuration file, # but this file is useful for keeping track of arrays and member disks. # In general, a mdadm.conf file is created, and updated, after arrays # are created. This is the opposite behavior of /etc/raidtab which is # created prior to array construction. [...]
My guess is "function properly" here means working with already detected/assembled arrays. Mdadm doesn't seem to try and autodetect arrays it doesn't know about yet. Greetings, jinks