On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 08:48 -0700, Andrew Burgess wrote:

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Odd....
 Maybe you have an initrd which is loading md as a module, then
 running "raidautorun" or similar?

..

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I suspect that the last comment is the clue, after pivotroot I bet it 
runs another init, not from the boot/initrd images, but from the init.d 
in the root filesystem.

You are absolutely correct. On Fedora core5, in rc.sysinit

        echo "raidautorun /dev/md0" | nash --quiet
        if [ -f /etc/mdadm.conf ]; then
            /sbin/mdadm -A -s
        fi
        

But my original observation was correct. The noautodetect was/is being
ignored because (whenever) there is an initrd. FC5 doesn't support raid
root partitions (mkinitrd doesn't put the right stuff in initrd), but
FC7 tries to. I have upgraded and things are mostly correct. Albeit, FC7
doesn't support my nested raid configuration and so it took some coaxing
to get the the upgrade done and a hack to coax mkinitrd into doing the
right thing.

Putting mdadm.conf on a floppy disk plus a little intervention with a
virtual console early in the upgrade process worked wonders.

One quick way to test this is to boot with "init=/bin/sh"
This lets all the initrd stuff run but nothing from the
root filesystem.

Neat idea. I'll try and remember that for the future.

-- 
Ian Dall [off-list ref]