RAID autodetect?

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Friday 25 November 2005 06:59 am, hewitt_tech wrote:
> It seems like software RAID on Linux could easily result in a chicken/egg
> situation. For example if your system were completely setup (root and all)
> on your RAID array and you had a failure that necessitated booting from a
> rescure disk, you might have quite a difficult time getting the
> configuration correct so that you could recover your system. I thought that
> hardware RAID arrays (usually SCSI) didn't have this problem since the
> platform software only sees a disk or disks and not the underlying RAID
> hardware. I'm probably wrong about that...
>
> -Alex

It's really only a matter of drivers.  In this case, the problem was a lack of 
IDE drivers in the boot kernel so it couldn't load the array.  While hardware 
RAID is a little easier in that the is no intelligence required about it from 
the kernel, the kernel still will need the controller's driver loaded, just 
like in this scenario.

Ultimately, you've just got to make sure you have a bootable kernel with the 
appropriate drivers to satisfy a system recovery need - and that applies to 
SCSI/IDE/HW/SW RAID setups just the same.
-N