As I mentioned before, I have succesfully created matching md partitions on a second hard drive (hde) and populated them using tar with the contents of the first (hda) drive. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-March/msg04521.html However I am having problems booting off the md partitions using the grub booter installed on the hda partition using the approach commonly given of adding two entries in the front of grub.conf to boot to /dev/md2 which is the new root partition on hde. I am wondering if I would be better off attempting to boot from the linux rescue disk and, while chrooted in /mnt/sysimage for the hde drives md partitions, reinstall the current kernel rpm. It seems to me that in such a state, rpm should think the root partition is a md partition and properly configure the created initrd.img for booting off of it. The question I have is what does the linux rescue cd do if it finds two different drives if linux installations on the machine? The hde drive doesn't have a grub setup on it yet so I am concerned that if both drive are available, the linux rescue cd will mount the partitions on the hda one and not the hde one unless I detach the hda drive. I am also still a bit confused about what grub does if it is installed on the first drive (hda) which still has normal partitions but has a grub.conf in the /boot partition on that drive that references md partitions for the root partition (root=/dev/md2). I assume grub will try to get /dev/md2 from the hda drive first and might generate and error before ever trying the hde drive. I have seen at least one reference of converting the partitions on the first drive to Raid AutoDetect even though the contents of the fstab on its partitions still reference normal partitions. My question is whether grub can load linux using normal partitions even if the partitions are set to fd (Raid Autodetect). That is does the use of the fd ID for partitions prevent those partitions from being used as normal partitions as well as md partitions. I suspect not but am unsure. Thanks in advance for any comments. Jack ps I assume in the worse scenario I can detach the hda drive, boot from the linux rescue cd and setup grub on the hde drive to boot the md partitions there. However I am unclear how I would ever be able to reattach the first drive (hda) to use it for the missing spares since it has grub setup on it.
