Hey guys, in the past I've always had separate partitions for my
/boot
/swap
/
/home

Now I'm setting up a machine to be my media/backup server and want it to be a RAID1+LVM, that's the setup I had on CentOS which I don't think I'm a huge fan of and also think it's setup only mirrored my /home on the two drives which is better than nothing but not what I wanted.

I want to COMPLETE mirrored drives, not just /home. these will be the parts I need

/biosboot
/boot
/swap
/
/home

Where I'm loosing it is from my reading you don't really make "real" partitions anymore just logical with LVM, that's fine but I'm iffy on the process. The other issues if I'm understanding it right is for the RAID1 to be complete I need to create a MD for each partition/lvm logical? I'm planning on doing this with the Debian installer if that makes a difference.

The purpose of raid 1 is maximum writing speeds. You're supposed to have 2 separate drives and you stripe between them filling each disk cache as you write. It's not for drive mirroring at all. I think it's raid 5 you want for that, and 2 or 3 drives as well.

If you don't know What you are doing with LVM,use fdisk or gdisk.

If you are defining a RAID1 container across two devices (using mdadm), LVM doesn't know or care.
mdadm manages the RAID, with LVM (on top) you just define a pv across the container, and allocate lvs for your mount points. You will need bootloader support if /boot is in the RAID. grub[2] should be ok, but I don't know what level of support Debian has.

FWIW, LVM now has much more flexible native RAID support - has failure policies, and (much) easier addition of devices. Fedora and RHEL/Centos has that support, don't know about Debian.

Yes, it is. Your describing RAID0

RAID5 is a mirror but does it differently and with a parity drive, I have 2 drives so RAID1 is my only mirror option.


Pretty sure those two can't create volume groups but I could be wrong on that. I figured it out in any case. No I wasn't to familiar with it aside from have the installer doing a generic setup for me but what what this forum is supposed to be for.

Thanks, after a lot of doing things backwards I got a hold on it. Still can't boot LOL, I've got my biosboot partition outside of the RAID, but may also need a separate /boot outside if it as well. Docs I was reading seemed like it didn't need both. If that doesn't do it I may just put in CentOS. I had that up and running but was being stubborn about leaving the .deb side of the world, but in the end it's still RHEL so I guess theirs worse things than using the King Enterprise OS.