Software RAID problems

[Eric Scott <ewscott@standby.com>]

Last week I posted with a myriad of problems that I couldn't figure out and a million people jumped in with solutions.  Thank you to everyone and especially Nate Carlson, who took the time to sit down with me.

I'm constructing a software RAID machine to optimize for maximum uptime at a low cost, IDE raid on a Promise card.  I have two 20GB drives partitioned as so:

/dev/hde1 - 256MB Linux partition
/dev/hde2 - 256MB Linux swap
/dev/hde3 - 19.5GB fd partition

/dev/hdg is partitioned the same way.

I compiled a RAID-aware kernel (not modules), ran mkraid /dev/md0 without problem; created the filesystem on /dev/md0; mounted the device and copied my entire directory to /dev/md0. I also copied the /boot directory to /dev/hde1 (this was the configuration that worked on the other machine last week).

I changed the lilo.conf file to reflect that the system should boot from the array, ran rdev to set the root device to /dev/md0 and changed /etc/fstab to correctly identify the partitions. LILO does not load completely, and when using a boot floppy, it tells me that the filesystem on md0 is bad.

What step did I miss?

Eric Scott
Standby Systems, Inc.
Tel 612.721.4473 Fax 612.724.8434