Making bootable SATA RAID1 array in Mandriva 2006

[andy liebman <andyliebman@aol.com>]

Hi,

I have spent the better part of this weekend struggling to get a SATA 
RAID1 array to boot in Mandriva 2006. I have read EVERYTHING I can find 
that's related. I'm stuck. Maybe somebody can point me in the right 
direction.

First, let me say it's not practical for me to compile all necessary 
drivers into the kernel. I realize that might make like easier.

So, here's the story in summary:

-- I have a motherboard with an ICH5 SATA chipset
-- My normal Mandriva installation boots off of SATA (in real SATA mode, 
not pretending to be IDE).
-- A while back, when I installed the bootloader on the single SATA 
drive, I chose to put it in the MBR and NOT on the first partition (I 
fear that might be part of the problem)
-- I added a second SATA drive, /dev/sdb, which came up fine.
-- I copied the partition layout from /dev/sda with sfdisk
-- I created two RAID1 devices from /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb6, with their 
counterparts "missing" (using mdadm)
-- I formated the two md devices with ext3
-- I rebooted with a LIVE CD version of Mandriva
-- I copied the contents of /dev/sda1 (/ partition) and /dev/sda6 (/home 
partition) to /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb6 using rsync.
-- I edited fstab and lilo.conf on the the RAID1 "/" partition so that 
they would refer to /dev/md1
-- I ran chroot on the /dev/md1 partition
-- I set up an /etc/mdadm.conf file (using mdadm --detail 
--scan>>/etc/mdadm.conf   -- that's where Mandriva puts it)
-- I added to lilo.conf "raid-extra-boot=  and tried both "mbr" and 
"/dev/sda,/dev/sdb"
-- I ran mkinitrd and created a new initrd in /boot on /dev/md1.  I got 
an error about not finding the 3w_9xxx driver, but I don't need to load 
that in the initrd anyway so I reran with --builtin=3w_9xxx so that 
mkinitrd would skip that driver that I don't need.

BUT, after all of this, I get a bunch of errors when I try to run lilo:
     Fatal: Trying to map files from unnamed device 0x0000

or

     trying map files unnamed


I tried putting an MBR on /dev/sdb with:
lilo -M /dev/sdb

I tried booting without /dev/sda and of course there's no bootloader on 
/dev/sdb so nothing happens.

Does anybody see a solution or see what I'm missing? Help would be 
appreciated. I can't believe this is so complicated! :(

Regards,
Andy Liebman