On 5/30/2013 4:59 PM, Norman Schklar wrote: > I plugged in the other 3 drives and went to the raid setup in Centos. > I created a raid 5 with the three disks. It doesn't allow using the 1st os > boot disk in the raid. > Should I use a usb drive to host an install then once it's running install > the system again In the raided drives? booting from soft raid has limitations. the /boot partition containing grub and the kernel either can't be raid or it can be mirrored, while the root partition can be full raid I generally avoid raid5/6 except for large scale bulk nearline archival storage, and use raid1 or 10 for all 'operational' stuff. I also tend to use 2 drives just for the OS and software, then seperate drives in whatever appropriate raid configuration for your large data (sql databases, websites, file server spaces, etc).... but I also don't like deploying raid without online hot spares. raid's only function is uptime availability in face of drive failures, and to aggreagate many drives into a single larger volume with potentially higher performance, its NOT a substitute for backups. -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast