I have recently installed Debian 505 to replace 504 because one of its new features is "experimental support" for sata software raid1. I have also tried to set up raid 1 at the same time but I cannot find how to access the array.

I installed the OS on a PATA drive and used 2 new SATA drives for the raid1 array (intended for data).

The installer seemed to want a mount point for Raid1, so I gave /media/disk.

Raid1 was not working after reboot, I then tried the following command:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --metadata=1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

this did not work at first but it did after unmounting the 2 sata drives
and this gave the following result:

size=488383936K mtime=Thu Jul 22 01:21:15 2010
mdadm: /dev/sdb1 appears to contain an ext2fs file system
size=488383936K mtime=Thu Jul 22 01:21:15 2010
Continue creating array? y
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.

cat /proc/mdstat gave the following result:
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
487307508 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU]
resync=PENDING
unused devices: <none>

This is the result of "mount"
/dev/hda1 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
procbususb on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda2 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda7 on /home type xfs (rw)
/dev/hda6 on /tmp type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda3 on /usr type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda5 on /var type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hdb on /media/cdrom0 type iso9660 (ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,user=rene)

I think the array is not accessible yet, can someone tell me what I should do?

Also, the 2 sata drives have ext3 filesystem, should they be reformatted to ext2? How? (It seems experimental support for raid.. in 505 could be intended to work on ext2 filesystems only!)

Thank you for your help.

As root, try

Thank you for your answer.

The file already exists and I get a message saying so when I try it.

However when I right-click on its icon and click "properties", I get unexpected details, /media/disk is owned by root, as expected but its size is reported as follows:

volume 243.1 MB
free space 109.9 MB
contents: nothing

the 2 drives are identical SATA 500GB (not MB)

Under Debian 504, (see explanation in initial post) I got a message that the superblocks could not be read and I thought (erroneously) I could counteract that possibility in 505 by leaving a bit of free space at the end of the disk, could it be that the space mentioned above is that space I left unused by Raid?

I found changing the owner of /media/disk from /root/root to user/users fixed the problem and I can now write to the array.