I just finished installing slackware on 2 SATA hard drives, using Linux software raid. My partitions look like this:


Drives
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb

Partitions
/dev/sda1 -> /boot
/dev/sda2 -> /
/dev/sda3 -> SWAP

/dev/sdb1 -> /
/dev/sdb2 -> SWAP

As you can see, /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb1 were combined to make my raid array. They are both 36GB partitions.

So during the Slackware installation, I created an /etc/raidtab file, and followed the instructions from the Linux Software RAID HowTo for a RAID0 array. I used the command
which worked fine. I started the setup, formatted this partition with the ext3 filesystem and started the installation. I actually did this process more than a few times, I've been playing around with it for the past 8.5 hours. This is probably the fifth time I started a fresh install and was my best so far. I have everything set up and running on the disks, but now I can't boot into it.



My kernel resides in /boot, which is a seperate 32MB partition on /dev/sda1. I installed lilo to the MBR, but also toyed around with trying to install to the /boot partition and floppy disks (floppies are a different error story for me!). I can boot the kernel but it kernel panics and asks me for some "init=" options. No problem, I have a pretty good grasp of Lilo. The problem is I need to edit my /etc/lilo.conf file, which is stored on my /dev/md0 raid array, which I cant access!

I need to be able to access this array so I can edit files on it, in an iterative process. It will probably take me quite a few reboots to get my system functioning.

I'm using the slackware installation CD as my "recovery CD", and I need to mount my array. I've tried doing:
but it wants an /etc/mtab file. I think I need to do something with the lsraid tool, is anyone familiar? Also if anyone has any other general tips on installing and life with RAID it would be appreciated. This is my first experience with configuring a RAID system, and my first experience with SATA hard drives. Its been a bit of a pain and I'm getting behind, I had hoped I would be installing apache and mod_perl by now.

Thanks!

If the partition type of /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb1 is 0xfd (linux raid auto) and your /dev/md0 raidtab entry included a "persistent-superblock 1" line, then I think /dev/md0 should be detected automatically when booting (check /proc/mdstat), i.e. you shouldn't need a raidtab.

If for some reason any of the above requirements was not met, I image you can just create a temporary /etc/raidtab (in memory, if you boot from the Slackware CD) which is identical to the original, and manually run raidstart.