discovered easy "cheat" to get slackware installed with raid
 

Here's my story...

I've always liked Slackware, but getting software raid arrays configured seemed confusing to me, installing the system first on a single hard drive, and then setting up arrays. I have 5 disks (sda through sde). I wanted to set up 2 disks with raid1 containing swapspace and root filesystem, and the other 3 as raid 5 containing /home. I decided to see if it would be easier to install with a different distro.

OpenSuse looked like it would be easy, but after setting everything up with YaSt and installing the whole thing, grub failed to find /boot. I gave up easily because YaSt is just too "friendly" for me.

So I discovered someone's easy-to-follow instructions to set up raid on Gentoo.
(see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-...ickinstall.xml)

I started the gentoo installation process according to those instructions. The following steps were the important ones needed in order to create the arrays:

I inserted the "minimal" gentoo install disk, using the gentoo-nofb kernel:

Using cfdisk I created identical "mirrored" partitions (2 each) on /dev/sda and /dev/sdb for swap and /. Then I single-partitioned /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd and /dev/sde, designating all 7 partitions as "Raid Autodetect."

mknod /dev/md0 b 9 0
mknod /dev/md1 b 9 1
mknod /dev/md2 b 9 2

...and then,

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2
mdadm --create /dev/md2 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1

Sometime after I got past this point I ran into some snags with the rest of the gentoo install. I could have finished it eventually but I was a little frustrated and took a break.

By some stroke of fortune I then put the Slackware 11.0 install disk in and rebooted. Guess what... Slackware setup recognized the arrays I had configured and very handily installed swap on md1, / on md0, and /home on md2. Auto-setup lilo on MBR and everything worked great. ...so easy!!!