Booting order / SATA onboard / IDE card

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 04:04:00PM -0400, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 02:32:00PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 
> >Well given I just installed one today, it is rather trivial.  The debian
> >installer certainly had no problem with it.
> >
> >You simply use software raid1.  Grub2 can boot that just fine.  When it
> >asks where to install grub, tell it the MBR of both sda and sdb.
> >Now either disk can be the boot drive.
> >
> >So in this case I set it up as:
> >
> >sda1 50GB + sdb1 50GB software raid1 for root (md0)
> >sda2 200GB + sdb2 200GB software raid1 for lvm (md1)
> >
> >I then created a volume group and crated a logical volume for swap,
> >/home and /data in the lvm.
> >
> >Grub2 got installed to sda and sdb and everything just works.
> >
> >Trivial really.
> >
> >I can put these drives in any other PC and it will still boot and still
> >have raid.  I have done it this way for close to 10 years.  It has always
> >been possible, although in the past you had to manually take care of
> >installing the bootloader to both drives.
> 
> Any chance you could post this in a bit more detail as a HOW-TO?  I'd
> love to do this on my next machine, and I daresay with a good document
> to work from more would do the same.

There really is no more to it.  The standard Debian installer offers
everything needed.

Partition both disks the same, setup raid1 on the partition pairs.
Use the raid1 devices to install on and install grub to the MBR of
both drives.  That's all the steps.

The LVM bit is just convinient.  Root on LVM can be done, but it makes
recovering from problems and booting a lot more complicated.  I don't
know why fedora likes to do that by default.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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