[ILUG] Booting a broken raid array

[Ciaran Johnston]

Kevin Philp wrote:
> I am looking for some advice on setting up a small raid array to replace
> our current single disk system in the office. The plan is to have a
> small Debian server with three disks, two running and a spare, in a raid
> 1 array and then run LVM on top.
>
> My question is about booting after a disk failure, particularly the
> primary disk. Where should I put the /boot partition, should it be
> outside of the raid array? can it be part of the raid array or can it
> even be part of the LVM groups?

AIUI, it cannot be part of LVM, but you can have a separate RAID array for
/boot and put the rest of the system on LVM

On a similar system (with no spare) I have two RAID arrays, md0 and md1.
md0 accounts for ~900M (yes, way too large for /boot, but just in case
...) and has a single ext3 partition. md1 uses the rest of the available
space and has LVM configured with ext3 partitions for /, /home, /var,
/var/mail, /tmp and swap.

Having /boot configured this way means that, no matter which disk fails
the other will still boot in degraded mode.

Regards,
Ciaran.