Sorry, I EOF'd too soon.. As to creating mirrored partitions over top of existing data, mdadm will write a superblock at the beginning of each mirrored component, which will blow up the first several bytes of the partition (probably the FS descriptor). I believe there is an option to create a raid1 pair without a superblock, but I don't think I would want to use it.
P.S. I'm sorry for not having a full name attached to my email address.. I'm baffled on how to do that with mailx. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
