[CentOS] Install CentOS with degraded raid

Thu Aug 19 22:41:09 UTC 2010
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:55:22 +0000 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> >But if I try to make the installation in a RAID-1 with a single disk,
> >the system does not allow it. There is any way to do it?
> 
> Drop into a shell, create (force) the md devices, partition etc then
> drop into the installer and go...

Eg: Ctrl-Alt-F2 will get you a shell.  Manually create the RAID set (but
with only one disk).  That is, use fdisk to partition the disk.  It is
important to set the partition types to Linux RAID auto-detect -- the
kernel needs this to start the RAID early in the boot process.  You'll
want two partitions: a small one for /boot, and the rest for a LVM
volume group (to be broken up into /, /home, swap, etc.). Once the RAID
sets are up and running, use Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get back to the installer.
You'll want to be sure to go back far enough in the process, so that
going forward will get you to where the RAID-1 / LVM volumn group will
be picked up.  You can then set up the file systems you need, etc.

Later, when you get the second disk, you can use sfdisk to 'dup' the
partitioning onto the new disk ('sfdisk -d /dev/sda|sfdisk /dev/sdb') ,
then use mdadm to add the partitions to the RAID arrays.

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