[CentOS] Installing on partitionable RAID arrays

[RedShift]

Phil Schaffner wrote:
> RedShift wrote:
>>> Another way to get CentOS on such a configuration would be to do 
>>> everything manually, thus installing the base system by creating the 
>>> necessary disk allocations and then rpm -i all the required packages 
>>> to get it to boot. (I've done this before, it's not a big deal, you 
>>> just need to follow a certain order - I remember documenting it 
>>> somewhere but forgot). But since this method is probably not 
>>> officially documented anywhere or even supported I'll most likely 
>>> won't get any support if this setup were to fail somehow (like when 
>>> upgrading between minor versions).
>>>
>>> I've tried STFW'ing, but searching for centos and partitionable arrays 
>>> is too ambiguous.
> 
> I tried googling too, and came up with lots of docs on "partitionable 
> arrays", but nothing on installing.  Can't say for sure without testing, 
> but I suspect GRUB would choke on this.  Would probably still need at 
> least a /boot on a separate partition, or a standard RAID1.
> 

GRUB works at least with a RAID 1 setup. (I run it in production on another distro). On a partitionable RAID 1, the data can still be read independently from the disks (that allows GRUB to work). If you have two disks you would install your GRUB MBR twice, once on both disks using the GRUB shell. I haven't tried other RAID forms but I see no reason why the built-in RAID 10 would not work as well.

>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>>
>>> Glenn Matthys 
>>
>> As a follow-up, I found the documentation I wrote how to install CentOS 
>> without any installer:
>>
>>
>> # First, setup your disks to your liking. You can use whatever you want 
>> here,
> ... snip ...
>> (PS: I've also attached the documentation as install_centos.txt, but 
>> mailman will probably strip it)
> 
> Attachment came through fine for me.  Very interesting - might make a 
> nice Wiki article, and could be included on a LiveCD as a way of 
> bootstrapping a CentOS install.
> 

I'll have a go at that.