RHEL + software RAID-1 with GRUB

[Chris]

Thank you to all who responded.  There is indeed a glitch with GRUB not 
liking to boot from software RAID partitions.  I resolved the problem, after 
tearing apart the system in question and discovering something so stupid I 
can't believe I didn't see this before.  The two drives in question were 
IDE, and they were on two separate IDE channels.  But the jumpers on them 
were set to MASTER on both, instead of "single drive", ie: no slave drive 
present.  Some drives need to be set to MASTER even in single-drive/channel 
configuration, but it looks like these Western Digital drives do 
differentiate between master and just a single drive and have different 
jumper settings for both options.  Once I changed them both to single drive 
(since they are on separate channels), Disk Druid allowed me to partition 
these drives with RAID configuration and GRUB is now booting just fine, even 
from a software RAID-1 /boot partition.  So it looks like Nigel was 
partially right - this actually does work, at least on some systems.  I've 
seen enough bug reports about GRUB not booting off software RAID partitions, 
including bugzilla reports, that it's indeed true - this may or may not 
work, depending on your particular hardware, motherboard, controller, etc.

Thank you again,

Chris




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vlad" <vlad at nkmz.donetsk.ua>
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 10:16 PM
Subject: Re: RHEL + software RAID-1 with GRUB


> Hello Chris,
>
> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/ref-guide/s1-grub-installing.html
>
> http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.d.stribblehill/mirrored_grub.html
>
>
> Thursday, October 6, 2005, 2:54:00 AM, you wrote:
>
> C> I'm working on a personal project and would like to create software 
> RAID-1
> C> with GRUB on RHEL 4.1.  Simple configuration:  2 physical hard drives 
> that I
> C> want to mirror the following partitions on: