[CentOS] Software RAID complete drives or individual partitions

[Gordon Messmer]

On 03/05/2013 05:58 AM, SilverTip257 wrote:
>
> Veering slightly from your original question...
> I recently set up softraid arrays by hand before invoking the Anaconda
> installer (on a 6.3 install).  Recent mdadm packages that ship with CentOS
> support metadata 1.1 and 1.2 (... actually defaulting to 1.2 I believe),
> but GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 1.0 and not the metadata version that
> mdadm defaulted to.  On my CentOS 5 installs in the past I've specifically
> set --metadata=0.90 to avert any catastrophes like this.

As far as I know, GRUB 0.97 only supports metadata 0.90, as does LILO. 
Anaconda will create arrays with 0.90 metadata for this reason.

The kernel wiki disagrees with me:
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_superblock_formats

Debian's documentation indicates that only grub 1.98+20100720-1 or later 
will boot from a RAID volume with a newer metadata format:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#mdadm-metadata