Fedora 9 Boot Problem

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 20:01:47 +0000,
  g <geleem at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> 
> if ide1,2 are non raid, can ide3,4 be used as true raid under linux after
> linux install?

There are significant advantages to just using software raid until Linux
and not using the on board raid. (In particular you won't need to replace
the motherboard with an identical one if it fails.) The only good reason
I have seen for running the fake raid with Linux is if you are dual booting
between Linux and Windows and need the raid devices visible to both.

Related to this, you want to be using smartmontools (smartd) to get a chance
at early warning of a disk failure and run regular checking (or scrubbing
if using raid 6) of your raid devices to fix badly written blocks. For
the latter you can make a crontab entry like:
0 22 * * * sh -c 'for raid in /sys/block/md*/md/sync_action;do echo "check" >> ${raid};done'