What to Mirror - RAID 1
 

Hi -
I would like to use RAID1 to mirror my OS. If I understand correctly just trying to mirror / will be my entire file system and isn't what I want to do. Will mirroring /boot give me the best chance of booting after one mirrored drive crashes?
Thanks.

Better ideas:
1. Get a live-cd, make a backup hadrcopy of /boot (hmm, how bout cd-r?) and restore, if anything happens.
2. Well, first of all , make a GRUB floppy.
3. As we all know, just for safety , get some decent dstro. Say, Debian? (FC4 is the main troublemaker round here.)

if first drive crashes then its mbr as crashed.

therefore you need to re-do grub into the backup drive .....the live cd is a very good idea for every troubleshooting so get one please.

once you rebuild or install a new drive....have a look at my preferred way of installing grub into mbr in the tutorial.....as it offers feedback.

then do it for (hd0) and (hd1)

I do not actually use raid my self as I throw salt over my shoulder every nanosec for luck, heh heh....(i prefer partimage)

What I do is have swap on each disk. Mirror /boot and /. After your install is done, su then 'grub':

grub> device (hd0) /dev/hda
grub> root (hd0,1)
you will get a message describing your file system.
grub> setup (hd0,1) [you might not need (hd0,1) here]

Then do hdb. To make sure it works, shut off your machine, unplug hda and see if the machine boots. I'm doing this off the top of my head ( I don't have my cheat sheet here) so take the code with a small grain of salt :)

This way if hda dies you can still boot normally without having to use a cd or boot floppy.

almost perfect....the setup is used to install the bootloader so it will be used in this way

su
grub
root (hdX,Y)....as per tut where is /boot partition or subfolder to /
setup (hdX)

where X will be first 0 then 1

if you do setup (hdX,Y) you are putting grub into the partition and will need a bootloader still in mbr....nothing wrong with that ....you could use lilo ...ntldr etc but why have 2 bootloaders when 1 suffices?