Re: Software RAID and Fakeraid

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 08:31:38PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> What do you mean help?

If the raid stores the raid info at the end, then the data starts at
sector 0.  So no space for a bootloader at all.

> It is left empty afaik, which is the whole point of shifting it over to 4kb.

Certainly makes sense.  Now is 4K enough for a boot loader?  Not sure.

> Obviously doing nothing is the simplest thing one can do.  Instead I  
> would like to do something and end up with a better, more functional  
> system.  Hence my suggestion on WHAT to do and the existence of this  
> entire thread.

I personally consider soft raid on raw devices so convluted that I
have never done it.  I would rather have something I know works with my
bootloader and other tools, than gain that extra 1MB (at most) that not
having partitions gives.  Also given many PCs won't boot from a drive
without a partition table, it isn't even an option then.

Really I think it comes down to only being able to handle the case
where there is a 4K gap, if you can fit grub in there in a format that
a system would be able to boot reading just sector 0 of the device.
The raid info at the start and raid info at the end both prevent you
from having any boot code in sector 0 so can't be supported at all.

-- 
Len Sorensen