factorQ.net

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Finally…I’ve gotten around to doing this.  It has really taken a lot longer than it should have…but life is busy (I even went on vacation somewhere in there…AND stripped wallpaper/painted 2 rooms in the house.  haha).
“Installing softRAID on Linux” is a more fitting title, at this point–being the Linux has been installed and working for quite a while, whereas the RAID has not.

I have changed my intended setup a few times during this journey, and have finally settled on leaving my /boot and /(root) partitions NON-raid, operating off of my /dev/sda drive.   My home (which happens to be sda4) I have successfully converted to a dual disk raid 1 setup.

This document proved exceedingly helpful,  I absolutely recommend it regardless of distribution.   As everything was pretty much set up in my previous posts, all I did was add my entries to /etc/mdadm.conf using the command “mdadm -E –scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf” .   After that, I did a rebuild of initcpio with this:
“[root ~]# mkinitcpio -g /boot/kernel26.img“.   I also added my /dev/md2 into my fstab (along with the swap on the second drive).

With a reboot…everything worked magically.  The only thing left for me to do was to reformat my single disk /home directory (sda4) to Linux raid auto detect (type “fd” using cfdisk), and then assemble the array.  To do all this, I booted up from the Arch Linux live cd, changed the type of the partition, and then booted back into my normal setup.  I was then able to run “mdadm -A /dev/md2 /dev/sda4” to add sda4 to the already running array md2.  This started a rebuild of the array, syncing sda4 with sdb4.  SUCCESS!

I am all done for now…  maybe one day I’ll have the time to fiddle around with getting the root and boot partitions to work the same way…but until then, I am happy with what I’ve got.  This was my end goal in the very beginning, anyway: to have a RAID backup for pictures and other important documents, which are stored in the /home directory.

Maybe someone will find this helpful, and save some time.  It definitely did me good to take a break so I could observe some things I had done wrong (or incompletely).