In the Debian world, I know how to create an mdadm array, format the file system and mount it. I was doing the same in Antergos while following the Arch wiki and things sort of went off the rails when I got towards the end.

In Debian, to save the array layout, you use: sudo update-initramfs -u

In Antergos/Arch, I guess that step is replaced with mkinitcpio and using the 'mdadm-udev' hook. When I got to that spot in the arch Wiki, the commands I was asked to type gave me bash errors so I manually edited the mdadm.conf file and added:

ARRAY /dev/md0 metadata=1.2 name=antergos:0 UUID=0078e14e:6ce6b00e:598d3151:beeb6694

then edited fstab.conf and added:
/dev/md0 /mnt/md0 ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0

My array is mounted at every boot and appears to be running AOK but since I didn’t do anything with mkinitcpio, did I miss some crucial step?

That wiki ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...iguration_file ) is easy enough to follow but after the steps about creating the array, it jumps to installing Arch ONTO the array. To a newbie, it seems to go sideways when telling you what to do after the array is created and what you need to do to save the layout.

Looking at the mkinitcpio wiki ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...o#Installation ) , do I just issue the following command: mkinitcpio -c /etc/mkinitcpio-custom.conf -g /boot/linux-custom.img … and add that mdadm_udev hook to the conf file?

Or, since I have the array mounting at boot, is everything “OK” and even though I didn’t use mkinitcpio, just leave it alone?

EDIT:

I went ahead and executed: sudo mkinitcpio -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/linux-custom.img and added mdadm_udev to the hooks section and everything looks good?!

I noticed there were a few more images in the /boot folder. fallback, lts, etc. Do I need to update those images with mkinitcpio?

I believe all I’m doing is creating a boot image that has built in support for mounting my RAID at startup, correct? If so, this isn’t a boot array or anything, just data for my Plex server so some worse case scenario my array doesn’t get mounted at startup, it isn’t the end of the world for me. Just means I’ll have to come back here and ask for help.

I guess I'm just looking for advice on mkinitcpio usage since I might be swtiching from Mint to Antergos on my Plex server.

Running both the update-initramfs -u and mkinitcpio seems redundant. Both, I would think perform the same function. So you boot your system to grub or lilo and then that bootstraps the kernel which in turn hands over control to the initramfs to initialize your file systems and then hands control to the init system. Both the above ‘hooks’ prepared your initramfs.. So if everything is working as it should, probably one of the above commands would suffice and I don’t think you are missing a step. Just my two cents.

It looks like that update-initramfs -u command only works in Debian land. In the Arch world, I think the equivalent command is replaced with mkinitcpio. I just don't fully understand that command and if it's fully necessary to run it to save your mdadm array into the kernel image.

Technically you don’t even need an initramfs unless you are running a more exotic filesystem or using something like LUKs for encryption. But yes, I believe one is the Debian solution for creating an initramfs and one is the Arch way.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...without-initrd