[ILUG] Booting a broken raid array

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, 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?

If it's not RAIDed, what happens if you lose the disk /boot is on?  

I'd have /boot on RAID1 personally.  Oh and take the time to get a working
grub on each disk, not just the first one.  It's easy enough to put grub on
a cdrom/floppy if you need to, but if you're not there and someone else has
to deal with things, if it just boots, you'll be glad of it.

I must admit I never bother separating /boot from / any more.  I just find
myself a few years down the road cursing the small /boot as I try to work
out which kernels to remove during an upgrade.  I know one reason to do
this was old bioses not being able to read large partitions.  Perhaps I'm
missing a big security issue here?

Gavin