[SLE] Bootsektor of a RAID 5 on SAS

Hi all,


I try to install an RAID 5 on a Dell 2950 with 3 SAS (Serial-Attached SCSI) disks.
I have tried two different approaches: With and without separate boot partition.

1.) With separate boot partition:

I tried the following partition scheme:

sd?1 40MB ext2 /boot
sd?2 1GB swap swap
sd?3 200GB raid /

The Yast partitioner gives no error message and everything installs smoothly.
The problem shows up, during booting: It can't mount, not even find the first partition.

#mount /dev/sda1 /boot
# Special device sda1 does not exist.

Fsck doesn't find it either.
But it is part of the fstab created by the installer.


2.) Without a separate boot partition:

Partition scheme:

sd?1 1GB swap swap
sd?2 200GB raid /


Here /boot is part of /. Yast's partitioner doesn't like that. Desperate as I am, I tried it. Especially, because I found some hints on the net on how to do it.
It installs smoothly, but of course it doesn't boot. So I boot from the rescue CD and try to write the boot sector myself.
I found out the disk geometry and created a "lilo.conf" like this:

disk=/dev/md15
bios=0x80
sectors=63
heads=255
cylinders=1106
partition=/dev/md0
start=1028160
boot=/dev/sda
image=/boot/vmlinux-2.2.10
label=autoraid
root=/dev/md0
read-only

But lilo, for some reason, didn't want to write the MBR:

Fatal: raidsetup: stat ("/dev/sda")


Could that be a driver problem or did I misunderstand RAID 5 or is it even something else?


Thanks for any help!
Phil


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