I've read in a few places where you're supposed to set the partition type to "fd" -- linux raid -- for mdadm arrays.

However, my ubuntu 8.10 version of parted doesn't seem to want to allow this option, nor can I easily find it mentioned in any of the parted docs.

Questions:

1) is it still necessary to set this to build arrays using mdadm/parted? I've managed to get it up and running without it, so trying to understand if this is historical or if I'm doing something wrong that will bite me later.

2) if this IS necessary, how do I go about changing the filesystem type?

3) purely from curiosity, does "fd" stand for anything, or is this just the assigned hex value for that specific partition type?

thanks...