SATA RAID-1 redundant boot?

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 14:53, Stewart Nelson wrote:

> As a result, I was forced to use software RAID for all drives.
> 
> 1. Could you please recommend a reliable and reasonably priced SATA
>    controller with hardware RAID-1 capability, BIOS boot code and a
>    compatible Linux driver? or,

The 3ware cards do hardware raid and work well with Linux. They
are a lot more expensive that the ones that make the driver
do the work in software.

> 3. Is there a way to set up two separate boot partitions, MBRs, etc.,
>    so that either can boot the system?

If you set the raid partitions up during the install and make
/boot a mirrored partition the installer should take care
of setting up the MBR on both drives.  (This is based on
installing RH9 on scsi drives using lilo, so it could
easily be wrong for fedora and/or grub).  You also have
to test to see if the system will boot at all if you have
a failed primary drive.  Most older IDE systems won't.  The
IBM Netfinity where I did the SCSI setup would move on
to the 2nd drive and boot.  I haven't tried anything with
SATA controllers yet.

I have seen the installer do some really stupid things
when trying to create raid mirrors (like rearrange the
partition layout, or try to pair things on the same
drive).  You can force the layout by using fdisk to
make the partitions manually, then starting the install
over and picking the partitions for each md set.  If
the partitions already exist, the installer won't try
to rearrange them (again, not based on current FC2, this
could be fixed now...).

I'm sure there is a simple lilo/grub invocation to
write the loader on the 2nd drive if you have a
/boot partition there and keep it up to date.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com