I am trying to make a clean install of linux on three new 500G HDs. Because the last failure caused loss of my wife's pictures, I'm in the dog house. I know, I know. Back-up, back-up, back-up.

I'm trying to set up a Raid 5 as partial insurance against disk failure (along with a frequent back up schedule). A friend suggested that I put 4-5 partitions in the raid array to aid in recovery if a disk fails (/boot, /, /var, /home, and swap). I know that swap doesn't get 'raided'. I've looked at 50+ tutorials on how to set up raid5 from a clean install and after installing the whole system. Nothing has helped or even addressed this issue so far.

Problem is that I have now tried installing 4 different flavors of linux (Ubuntu, Mint, and a couple of distros of Fedora) with the custom disk partitioning as mentioned above. I've tried installing grub on the MBR and the first partition (/boot). I've ensured that it pointed to the correct partition to find the kernel (/). I've tried everything that I can think of, and at every reboot, I get dumped to the grub CLI after bios post, regardless of distro. I cannot get the system to load the kernel.

I suspect that it has something to do with the partitioning. Help!?

I want you to down load puppylinux run it in ram as usual and type fdisk -l and really see how your bios are telling your system were your drives and partitions are set up. Or put any live cd and do it why I have found on my last trouble shoot of installs on debian Ubuntu that the things mixed up. seems the installer is naming things one way and the bios are different. I do not know how that could happen but it happens with sata mixed with pata drives.

sda is partitioned as I described. No current partitions on sdb or sdc. However, there are two partitions without any valid content dm-0 and dm-1 Not sure what/where they came from.

//edit
Searched the forums and discovered that the dm-* refer to LVM volumes/partitions.
//tide

Thank you.

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