Grettengs!  This is my first post to the list.

On my system (a dedicated fileserver running gentoo Linux) I partition all 
of my drives the same way:
P1 - 1 cyl - /boot
P2 - swap
P3 - 2G/RAID 5 - /
L5 - 4G/ext2 - / alternate
L* - 35G/RAID 5 - Storage partitions

I use lilo with a duel boot.
Default boot uses the RAID 5 root.
Secondary boot uses the ext2 root.  This partition is copied onto every drive.

This way, I have all of the advantages of RAID 5 for my OS, but I can boot 
to a mundane partition if the RAID should break or needs maintanence (like 
adding another drive).
If the boot drive dies, I can boot from CD and chroot to any of the 
remaining drive's L5 partition.
I have tested both boots and it works quite well.  The cost in space is 4G 
from a 250G drive.  About a 2% overhead.

It could be argued that this layout would be more efficient if root were 
placed closer to the center of the cylinders.  But this is not a very 
active machine.  It basicly holds my large multimedia files while they wait 
their turn for processing (takes 100G to filter and process 1 hour of 
video).  No data streaming applications.  So I took the mental shortcut.

Hope this is useful.

Bob W.

At 12:03 PM 4/19/2004, you wrote:

Hi Paul!

Paul Phillips schrieb:

quoted

I was under the impression that I can't boot off raid-5, but if that
information is dated then all the better.
Thanks again.

Afaik, that´s still true. The reason is that the two (or more) drives of a 
raid 1 essentially hold the same data, and if you do everything right, the 
complete boot mechanism is on all disks, so that you can boot with any of 
them. On raid 5 disks, you would never have the complete data on any of 
the disks.

Norman.

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