I have a software RAID1 drive with a spare for my Fedora 8 install.

/boot and / are mirrored across 2 drives. The spare does not seem to get a filesystem or anything else useful on it so if I boot from it, the boot hangs, there's nothing to boot.

I've configured the bios to boot from the 1st and 2nd drives first (the mirrored pair that does have a valid /boot partition) but it seems like something is not honoring that boot order.

Would that be the BIOS? or grub?

is there any known working setup w/ a RAID1 and spares w/ grub - I can't seem to find any answers on that...

Grub works just fine with RAID 1; but you have to install it to both MBRs if you want to be able to boot from either drive (which I would think you'd want to if you're booting off RAID 1)

The spare doesn't get written to, because it is a spare! If and when one of the active RAID 1 drives goes down, then the spare should be added automatically, if everything is setup properly.

If you want the third drive to be bootable with a file system, then setup RAID 1 with 3 drives mirrored.

so i installed grub on the mirrored disks, that seems to do it.

so i think the problem is w/ kickstart then... the box was build w/ kickstart.

i have:

so that should put grub on the mbr of each drive?

or do i need to put something in the post-install to do it ?

Sorry, I don't know kickstart. However, I suspect you will have to manually put grub on the mbr of all booting drives. You can use grub-install or the Supergrub CD for that. Might have to ask a knowledgeable kickstart user.