[arch-general] Why Is My RAID Installing Failing?

[dave reisner]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Carlos Williams <carloswill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:21 AM, dave reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
>> With mdadm in your initrd, you don't need to specify the parameters of
>> the array in Grub. Foregoing that, the first parameter passed to the
>> "md" option is the type of raid array (e,g, 0, 1, 456) and not the
>> number of devices in the array. Sounds good, otherwise.
>
> Dave,
>
> Sorry I am confused. Are you saying that I should not do as Baho
> suggested to my Grub's menu.lst? So what now? I am really lost. I am
> being told to not add any 'mdadm' and 'raid1' modules & hooks into my
> system configuration because it needs to be done in Grub. But it seems
> to me now you're telling me I should not have to mess with Grub. I
> just want a simple RAID1 mirror on my system and the Wiki is a
> complete mess and not working for me.
>

Hrmm, I've followed the wiki [1] a few times and it hasn't steered me
wrong. While it does combine some of the old with the new, it makes
one point fairly clear when messing with Grub:

"Nowadays (2009.02), with the mdadm hook in the initrd it it no longer
necessary to add kernel parameters concerning the RAID array(s)."

So it's one or the other. Either the mdadm hook in initrd assembles
your array, or Grub does it for you. I apologize if my last post was a
little confusing as well -- I was trying to point out that if you did
go with the Grub assembled array, your parameters were incorrect.
However, as you did specify mdadm for your initrd, you do not need to
pass this option in Grub at all.

Hope that's a little clearer.

[1] http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_with_Software_RAID_or_LVM