lilo + raid = disaster (again)

[Antony Gelberg <antony@antgel.co.uk>]

Ok, this is very annoying.  I was converting a server to RAID-1.  The
drives are SATA and use the siimage driver.  They are hda and hdc.

I had a nice Woody system up and running on hda.  I created /dev/md0
with hdc, and a missing drive.  I did a cp -ax to copy everything on hda
to md0.

All I needed was to get the boot loader sorted.  I put boot=/dev/md0 and
root=/dev/md0 in lilo.conf, and changed fstab to mount / on md0.  Lilo
came back with some errors.  Unfortunately I don't have them to hand,
but it was something like the boot map not being on the root device
(this is vague, sorry).

So I tried lilo -M /dev/hda and then /dev/hdc.  This is where it goes a
bit fuzzy.  On reboot, I only got the dreaded LI.  I unplugged hda, and
hdc came up with lots of 01 (or something) repeated.

I need to install lilo properly.  I noticed that the latest d-i contains
2.4.25, which has the siimage driver, so I gave it a crack.  I could nip
into the shell and mount the disks, but I could not for the life of me
get lilo to work.  I'd settle for just getting it back on /dev/hda, and
then actually trying to get the booting RAID set up without shagging it
all up again.  I tried lilo -r /mnt, but it said that -r was an
unrecognised option.

(I have another box booting off RAID-1, and it doesn't need the
raid-extra-boot line.)

Any ideas or help would be more appreciated than you might believe.

A

PS d-b folks, please CC me as I'm not subbed.
PPS I couldn't build a lilo floppy as this box is floppyless.
PPPS Was this problem caused by trying to install lilo on a running
system with / mounted to hda not md0?  Put another way, would it work if
I booted from lilo on hda, mounted / as md0, _then_ ran lilo on md0?