[SGVLUG] problems booting raid

[Claude Felizardo]

Has anything changed with regard to booting via RAID?  Does udev get
involved with the boot process differently since 2.6.12?

On my old system, I had / and /boot on separate RAID-1 partitions with
everything else on RAID-5.  For the upgrade, I installed 2.6.17 on a
spare drive so / is currently on /dev/hdg3.  Now that everything is
working fine with the new OS, I want to move / back to the RAID so I
can get rid of the extra drive.  However when I try to boot with
root=/dev/md1, I get an error that looks like the raid isn't ready so
when it pivots root, it panics.   I tried it with /boot on the same or
different RAID device as /, none work.  Unfortunately I overwrote the
original root partition when I copied the new OS to it.  I can boot
either the new or old versions from the spare disk.

I've tried changing /etc/fstab, /etc/lilo.conf and /etc/mdadm.  Is
there another file now?

Portion of my /etc/lilo:

image=/boot/vmlinuz
        label="mdk2007.1"              <-- this is the default and works fine
        root=/dev/hdg3
        initrd=/boot/initrd.img
        vga=785
image=/boot/vmlinuz
        label="mdk2007.1-raid"   <--- this one fails at boot
        root=/dev/md1
        initrd=/boot/initrd.img
        append="acpi=ht "          <-- I tried adding this from my old
system but it didn't help
        vga=785

When i boot via the spare drive, once the system comes up fine, I can
see all of my raid devices working fine via /proc/mdstat.

I've been using rsync -avP to try and copy everything from hdg3 to
md1.   /etc/initrd is there for pivot_root.  Is there a proper way to
copy /dev and /sys?  I tried booting my mdk2006 image so that /dev/
and /sys weren't live so I can copy but that didn't seem to work
either.

When booting RAID, can I combine / and /boot together or do they have
to be separate.  They were separate before but I don't recall why.  It
might have been carry over from when /boot had to be near the begining
of the disk.  Does that still apply?

Is there a /etc/udev file I need to tweak somewhere?

claude