I spent part of this afternoon battling the same thing I think using
feisty BETA also.  I'm quite familiar with software RAID on linux, and a
few comments:

1.  It seems that unlike in older distros, /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf in
feisty is fairly important.  Without adding the ARRAYs entries to it, my
arrays wouldn't reliably show up each time I booted.  This never seemed
necessary with older CentOS or RedHat distros nor Edgy.  I'm not
complaining, just mentioning in hopes of helping others.

2.  I'm a bit ashamed about my setup - trying to get more mileage out of
junk basically.  MB is Asrock 775 DualVSTA - which has the Via PT880
chipset, then two Promise 100TX2 for a total of six PATA drives.  The
two drives attached to the two PATA ports on the mobo show up as
/dev/hda and /dev/hdc respectively - and the four drives attached to the
two TX2s show up as /dev/sd[a-d].  My RAID setup is 6 identical 200GB
drives:

/dev/hd[ac]1 => /dev/md0 (RAID1) -> /boot
/dev/sd[a-d]1 -> striped swap
/dev/hd[ac]2 /dev/sd[a-d]2 -> /dev/md1 (RAID5) -> /

I don't use the alternate install disk - instead opting to just use the
desktop install on /dev/hda, then manually partitioning and setting up
raid on the cmd line similar to
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2005-March/003813.html.  I've
used this technique many times on a wide array of hardware and distros,
and it has always worked for me.

The problem I see is that when I boot off the RAID1, it wigs out and I
get dumped into the BusyBox initramfs prompt.  I know that the initramfs
has to have the modules required to mount the root filesystem in it -
and I've made sure of that.  My problem now is that I seem to be able to
either get the promise controllers to show up or the onboard Via, but
not both at the same time which of course precludes both RAID arrays
from working/booting properly.

The weird thing is that if I switch hda and hdc back around again to
boot normally without RAID, everything returns to working and the drives
all show up properly.  I don't understand this, particularly because the
initrds are identical in both cases.

It seems like feisty has alot of changes in how IDE devices are handled.
Can anyone give me any hints on additional things to try and also tell
me how does the kernel determine what order to load the modules?  It
seems like in the case of root=/dev/md0 it must be loading them in a
different order than root=/dev/hda1 - and this may be causing a
conflict.

-- 
Feisty beta1 raid is broken
https://launchpad.net/bugs/96511

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