Mark C wrote:

> Hmmm. *I have enough of these 45GB drives around that I could do a whole
> bunch of RAID1 arrays too, but first I have to get past the initial
> problem.

Well - I haven't installed stable for a while, but "Etch/testing" installs
clean with lvm on top of raid-1 - just make sure you got a /boot
partition that is not part of the lvm (I usually leave / off the lvm
too). Using Debian/Testing installer, my usual method is:

1st partition: 512 MB Physical partition for raid-1
2nd partition: 512 MB SWAP
3rd partition: the rest - physical partition for raid-1

Once all drives has been partitioned I create the arrays needed - first
the boot one (which becomes md0) next the ones used for lvm.

Once raid's have been created I assign the first 512MB one as a normal
partition with ext3 mounted on "/". The other raids I mark as "physical
volume for logical volume manager".

Then I configure lvm - in this case one volume group that includes all the
raids not used for root partition.

That's about it. This have worked flawlessly in all the testing's I've
installed over the past - say 2 years at least.

Only thing that needs a bit of manual work is to get GRUB installed on
more than one disk so that the system can boot even if the first disk
trashes itself.

--
Lars