I'm trying to set up software based RAID 1 on a machine. I've followed the HOWTO to a "t", yet when I go to try to mdraid /dev/md0 I get errors and it aborts on me. cat /proc/mdstat doesn't tell me anything new, and syslog says something about "superblock magic" (Like an idiot, I don't have the error in front of me right now). My kernel 2.4.18 and I have the RAIDtools installed, so the only thing I can think of is perhaps the way the drives are jumpered. hda is jumpered for cable detect and is the only device on it's IDE controller. hdc is jumpered for master and shares a controller with hdd which is my cdrom. Should this be different? Does anyone have the secret decoder ring for software based RAID 1?

So your kenel is built to support RAID1 yeah? Can you access the disk individually? I take it you must be able to do this or you wouldn't be able to create the partitions to make your RAID partitions.

Post details of your partition tables on the relevant disk and your raidtab, and that error message from mkraid.

cheers

Jamie...

Thanks for the reply. Actually, I got it and it had nothing to do with the jumpers. I found that I had to boot and load the kernel from the cdrom, do the mkraid /dev/md0 thing, then once everything was synched, reboot as normal and do a raidstart /dev/md0 I also edited lilo.conf to look for md0 as the boot disk and changed hda1 to type fd in fdisk. Works perfectly now! The dang HOWTO didn't quite get into all of that.