[CentOS] Booting Software RAID

Fri Jan 24 17:25:53 UTC 2014
Matt <matt.mailinglists at gmail.com>

>> I installed Centos 6.x 64 bit with the minimal ISO and used two disks
>> in RAID 1 array.
>>
>> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/md2         97G  918M   91G   1% /
>> tmpfs            16G     0   16G   0% /dev/shm
>> /dev/md1        485M   54M  407M  12% /boot
>> /dev/md3        3.4T  198M  3.2T   1% /vz
>>
>> Personalities : [raid1]
>> md1 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
>>       511936 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU]
>> md3 : active raid1 sda4[0] sdb4[1]
>>       3672901440 blocks super 1.1 [2/2] [UU]
>>       bitmap: 0/28 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
>> md2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0]
>>       102334336 blocks super 1.1 [2/2] [UU]
>>       bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
>> md0 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
>>       131006336 blocks super 1.1 [2/2] [UU]
>>
>> My question is if sda one fails will it still boot on sdb?  Did the
>> install process write the boot sector on both disks or just sda?  How
>> do I check and if its not on sdb how do I copy it there?

> no, you need to run grub-install /dev/sdb manually
> keep in mind you need to do the same after replace a disk
> the first part of grub is outside the RAID itself in the MBR

# file -s /dev/sda
/dev/sda: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version
0x3, boot drive 0x80, 1st sector stage2 0x849fc, GRUB version 0.94;
partition 1: ID=0xee, starthead 0, startsector 1, 4294967295 sectors,
extended partition table (last)\011, code offset 0x48

# file -s /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version
0x3, boot drive 0x80, 1st sector stage2 0x849fc, GRUB version 0.94;
partition 1: ID=0xee, starthead 0, startsector 1, 4294967295 sectors,
extended partition table (last)\011, code offset 0x48

I am guessing this is saying its present on both?  I did nothing to
copy it there so it must have done it during the centos 6.x install
process.