Trouble installing with software RAID

[K0byB0y]

Hello All,

I'm having some trouble installing RC3 using a software RAID setup. The problem is very bizarre but I think the answer is simple I'm just missing a set somewhere.
The machine I'm wanting to install is an Athlon-XP 2600 with 512MB or RAM and I have 2 80GB Western Digital drives (both with 8MB on-board cache) configured to be primary devices on IDE channel 1 and IDE channel 2. I know the hardware works because I've ran Windows 2000 with a software RAID and Red Hat 8.0 with a software RAID on this same exact box so it's pretty safe to say my problem is hardware related.
When I start installing Gentoo I have to kick it off with the "nonet" and "cdcache" options. nonet is needed because my machine hangs at the detection of NIC card and I throw in cdcache because the cd-rom drive on that box is really loud and I don't want to generate more noise then needed. The install kick-off fine and I do a "modprobe md" to load the software RAID drives no problem. Next I partition my drives the following way (both drives are partitioned the exact same way):

/dev/had:

/dev/hda1 /boot 100MB
/dev/hda2 swap 512MB
/dev/hda3 /home 20,000MB
/dev/hda4 / 59,000MB

/dev/hdc:

/dev/hdc1 /boot 100MB
/dev/hdc2 swap 512MB
/dev/hdc3 /home 20,000MB
/dev/hdc4 / 59,000MB

Partitioning gives me no problems everything is dandy up to this point. I want to have my /boot and my /home as a RAID 1 (mirrored) drive and my / as a RAID 0 (stripped) drive so in the /etc/raidtab file I put this:

# /boot (RAID 1)
raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level 1
nr-raid-disks 2
chunksize 32
persistent-superblock 1
device /dev/hda1
raid-disk 0
device /dev/hdc1
raid-disk 1

# / (RAID 0)
raiddev /dev/md2
raid-level 0
nr-raid-disks 2
chunksize 32
persistent-superblock 1
device /dev/hda4
raid-disk 0
device /dev/hdc4
raid-disk 1

# /home (RAID 1)
raiddev /dev/md2
raid-level 1
nr-raid-disks 2
chunk-size 32
persistent-superblock 1
device /dev/hda3
raid-disk 0
device /dev/hdc3
raid-disk 1

Nothing fancy just the basic stuff. Next I create my RAID devices with "mkraid". I make sure the drives have stopped working between issuing command even though I get a command prompt back while the devices are being created. I put file-systems on them and I turn both swap drives on. Doing a "cat /proc/mdstat" shows that all RAID devices are up and running as expected. Everything looks good. Next I mount the RAID devices:

mkdir /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/md2 /mnt/gentoo
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/gentoo/boot

I download a stage-1 tarball from ibiblio under /mnt/gentoo and untar it successfully. I mount the proc directory with "mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc" successfully also and copy over resolv.conf (cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf) and my raidtab file (cp /etc/raidtab /mnt/gentoo/etc/raidtab). I edit my /etc/make.conf file and I kick off the bootstrap process. Everything is fine up until this point. My problems begin right after.
When the bootstrap process is done and I do a "df" I get an error message saying "could not read mounted file system files". If I type in any command the command never completes it just hangs (not even CTRL+C can kill it). Once I even manged to do a complete successful "emerge system" and then I got the same error messages. I'm thinking that my file system becomes MIA at some point during the bootstrap and/or the emerge process, however I do NOT get an error messages during either process about file systems not being able to be found. Can anyone hint at what I'm doing wrong ? Any feedback would be much appreciated. I'm completely out of ideas at this point...

[vikwiz]

I'm running well on LVM Logical volumes on top of RAID 1 mirrors.
I have a different layout, two 100G disks splited to 20 about 5G partition each, most of them in md pairs, so I can add/remove/move freely PV's in VG's I use ReiserFS except my boot partition which is ext2 (not ext3, grub didn't like it).

Actualy I don't have my boot partition on RAID either, because I had issues with Grub, and didn't have time to figure out how to do it. Earlier I could manage it with lilo. Anyone has a tip for this But the rest works well.

[K0byB0y]

Thanks for the reply but something weird is going on. Last night on this partuicular box Gentoo decided to install itself fine this time. I didn't change any hardware and I didn't change anything in my install process. Very weird indeed...
I didn't have any issues with Grub. The only thing that was "tricky" to remember was that you need to refer to your boot drive as the RAID drive ONLY in the last line of your grub config. In my case it would have been:

kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/md2

If you want I can e-mail you my grub config if you decide to change you mind in the future and decide to go with GRUB.
I noticed that you are from Hungary. Are you Hungarian ? Do you speak it ? I'm Hungarian too

[vikwiz]