[Wolves] Chicken-and-egg situation regarding HPT372 RAID controller

[Jayne Heger]

> Can you not have your root filesystem not be on the RAID? That way you
> wouldn't need RAID support that early, and when you've got a root
> filesystem you can then insert the module and mount all the other
> filesystems off the RAID...

I don't think the root filesystem can be RAID unfortunately. If you are using 
a reiser based filesystem that can defintely not be a root filesystem (unless 
things have now changed). But you would want reiser or ext3 filesystem on 
your RAID anyway as can you imagine a RAID failure on a ext2 filesystem, 
esp;ecially yours 100GB disk, whoo! would take hours.

Kernels that support soft RAID is from 2*4 onwards
I did a presentation on RAID using Linux on one of my degree modules last 
year.
I have taken a snippet of part of it which may or may not help you at all )


In Linux all the system boot up messages can be asseseed through the /var/log
Or in the case of SuSE ctl +alt +f10, probably the same for other distros as 
well.
 or in the case of RAID  doing a cat /proc/mdstat which is a daemon for all 
the RAID devices connected to your computer.

Another way to protect RAID in Linux is to run the command ckraid -fix in 
single user mode before fsck, you could ad it to /etc/rc.local so it runs on 
every boot, so if a failure occurs it will check automatically.
It works by fixing the 1st disk of RAID then copy that to others in the mirror 
array.

I do hope this helps )
Good Luck

Jayne