It does make it easier to install on a single PATA hard drive. Then make a ramdisk or initrd file to include lvm, dm, raid, reiserfs, and raid1 modules in order for the kernel to boot. After you got that sorted out, you can copy and install the boot loader to MBR on the the SATA hard drives. Copying files is no big deal just use cp -av source destination. You can skip all this only if you go through the expert text level.

I am not starting an ReiserFS vs XFS war. I just telling you from experience that ReiserFS does gets corrupted easier than XFS if you are not careful with the mount options. I have used ReiserFS and it lost some files that is needed for some services to run.

dmraid is a utility that reads the software RAID metadata that is stored in the controllers BIOS. dmraid does use userspace, so the kernel must have support for this utility to work. You can check by searching for a module named dm.ko if you are using kernel version 2.6.x. It will be a little harder to setup for root device because the ramdisk file have to have certain utilities, libraries, and modules that dmraid needs.


The halt problem that Linux is having during detecting the drives on the controller is probably a very long timeout that is set by the manufacture or by the kernel developers that the kernel is wating for. On the unused ports, you can specify noprobe at the bootloader screen. I had to do this for hdf and hdh. On some cases you can include noapic and noapci. ReiserFS does take some time to mount so you have to wait up to 10 seconds on some partitions with that setup.

Setting /var to 10 GB is overkill. I suggest something like 256 MB or 512 MB. Also 256 MB for /boot is overkill. Something around 16 MB to 32 MB are good for /boot. I suggest making 512 MB swap partitions on all drives then specify the same priority to all of them. The kernel will automatically do RAID 0 (stripping) for swap.