migrating to RAID with kernel 2.6

From: Jack Wasey (news_at_jackwasey.com)
Date: 03/31/04 

Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 01:13:21 +0300

I must have read 150 howtos,faqs,docs and postings, but I really have
made no progress. Please help me boot my system directly into RAID. I'd
really appreciate any help.

The system is a Debian box, running kernel 2.6.4. I'm trying to convert
the two IDE hard disks to run as a mirrored RAID1 array, attached to the
onboard PROMISE fasttrak controller. Despite the PROMISE controller,
this is effectively a Software RAID solution, as the kernel just sees
two IDE devices. I want to mirror all the partitions, although I'd be
happy to let /boot be separate if necessary.

  On boot, I get the following error:

  md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
  md: autorun ...
  md: ... autorun DONE.
  ...
  ...
  VFS: Cannot open root device "905" or md5
  Please append a correct "root=" boot option
  Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on md5

  So, no raid arrays are detected. The partitions have hex code 'fd'
(linux raid autodetect).

  Each partition boot,root,usr and var is mirrored exactly on the other
disk. This is all fine, and under KNOPPIX, I can use mdadm to set up the
arrays, mount them, and everything works as expected. My kernel has
everything appropriate compiled in: md, raid1, ext2, ext3 and so on, and
I boot it directly, not via initrd.

  An excerpt from my lilo.conf is at the moment (although I've made many
changes):
  lba32
  boot=/dev/md2
  raid-extra-boot=/dev/hde,/dev/hdg
  root=/dev/md5

  lilo runs successfully, but evidently, the raid device isn't available
at boot time on device major number 9. I didn't assign md0 or md1: is
this the problem? I matched the mdx numbers to the original partition
numbers.

  Please can anyone point me in the right direction?

  Many thanks,
  Jack

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