Installing Debian Sarge with software RAID

As can be seen in the next screenshot, my first disk has been partitioned, into a large 699Mb RAID partition, and a 98.7Mb swap partition. You should now repeat the process with the free space on the second disk.

The second disk's partition table should be identical to that on the first. If your second disk isn't exactly the same size as the first, try to create partitions of similar size on each, and then leave a bit of space left over on the larger disk.


So now, you have two disks with similar, if not identical, partition tables. In the screenshot below, we can see on my system, they have been laid out identically, one 699Mb RAID partition and one 98.7Mb swap partition on each.

Now cursor up and select the "Configure software RAID" item.



At this point, the program will ask you if you want to write the partition table changes that you made to the disk. This will overwrite whatever partition table your disks previously had, so make sure you consider the ramifications of this before selecting "Yes".



With the new partition table that we created written to the disks, we can now build our mirror. Select "Create MD Device":



We're building a mirrored disk system here, so select "RAID1".



Our mirror has two active partitions (one on each disk), so select '2'



We don't have a spare disk for a failover device, so enter '0' for the number of spare devices.