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So yesterday I got a couple of new HDD’s:  WD black 640 GB 3.5″ drives, so I figured I would do something I had wanted to do for a while:  give my primary desktop a RAID setup.  I’ve gotten tired of backing up pictures and other important information (…but mostly pictures), and it would make my life easier to have a RAID1 array.

However,  I do not have a hardware RAID, or anything of that nature.  So after doing some searching, I came up with these links:

• Ubuntu Installation/  SoftwareRAID
• How to configure Linux Software Raid using mdadm on Ubuntu
• How To Set Up Software RAID1 On A Running System (Incl. GRUB Configuration) (Debian Lenny)

So, following along with the collective of what these articles were stating, I went to download the Ubuntu Alternate installer CD.  This did not turn out very well, though.  I downloaded it twice, and had the right md5sum.  Burned it 3 times, and each time when I checked the disc for defects, the same file was always corrupted.   How can this happen?  I even tried two different burners.

Giving up on this, I went for the regular AMD64 Desktop installer.  I figured I could boot to the live environment, and then do an apt-get update followed by an apt-get install mdadm.

I removed my previous hard drives:  a 40GB drive (containing my /boot,  /[root],  a swap, and other such things), and my 300 GB drive (which contained /home, and a store partition that was shared between users).  I installed the twin 640GB drives onto SATA1 and SATA2 ports.

In the live environment, I opened up GParted and partitioned the drives (nearly) identically–The only difference with drive sdb was that I left out the /boot partition, and made the swap 1.5 GB.
Drive sda:

• 500mb /boot partition
• 1GB swap area
• 15 GB  /root (a)
• 500-whatever-was-left GB for /home (a)

I then used the commands above to install mdadm, and then I built two arrays.
I don’t really care about /[root] being backed up, so I decided to go for a little performance with RAID0:
sudo mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=0 –chunk=4 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sd2
Then I made my main /home partition,  which I most certainly do want backed up:
sudo mdadm –create /dev/md1 –level=1 –chunk=64 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sda4 /dev/sd3

I assembled and activated the arrays, and then ran the installer.  Proceeded through it normally, selecting root to be on /dev/md0, and home to be on /dev/md1.  Completed normally.

Rebooted, came up to grub, continued into Ubuntu bootup screen.  and Goes into the BusyBox bash prompt.  Something wasn’t right.

This was pretty much as far as I got last night, being a big under the weather, and it got late.  I looked up some things and I think it may be due to the location of the kernel, or the way the kernel was set up when mdadm was ran.  I think I know how to fix it (potentially), but I’ll continue on with “part 2.”