Tim Day wrote:
I just tried to use a software raid device as '/', but soon after selecting the partitioner's "Finish partitioning and write changes to disk" a dialog says: "Debian does not currently support using software raid for the root filesystem or /boot partition. A system installed in this way will not boot". Does that simply mean that the debian installer doesn't support setting it up, or is it telling me something more fundamental (ie lots of otherdebian stuff won't support it either) ? Any plans for this to change ? Would I fare any better throwing LVM or EVMS into the mix too ?(I'm using the 20040704 sarge netinst, BTW).
Debian's mkinitrd supports root on RAID1, LVM, or LVM-on-RAID1.The debian installer, however, doesn't know how to install with root & boot on anything but a 'plain' partition. There are several ways around this (search the archives for a message from me describing how to install to root-on-LVM-on-RAID for details on one such method).
I've recently decided to move root off the LVM, and am now running root and boot as seperate RAID1 devices, with everything else (usr, var, tmp, home, and swap) on LVM+RAID5.
You can 'trick' the debian installer to install directly onto a RAID, or (what I did), just do a plain install (root and boot on plain partitions), then migrate to a RAID1 mirror after the system is installed.
You'll probably also want to dig up my patches to add RAID1 support to grub-install and update-grub (posted to debian-boot a week or two ago) if you're running grub (and don't want to manually update menu.lst whenever you add/remove kernels).
-- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net