BOLVERK – Tim's Lousy Blog

I just finished setting up a machine with a pair of SATA disks using an onboard Promise controller on Debian Sarge. Steps to configure this follow.

1. Installed disks but do not define a RAID in the controllers bios
2. Boot Debian Sarge installer disk, loading 2.6 kernel via linux26 command
3. Partition creation
   • Manually edit partition table
   • Create one partition on each disk for sway, I did not add these to the RAID so this can be defined as swap. The sum total will be available to the OS
   • Create one partition for /boot, define as RAID.
   • Create one (or more) partition(s) to fill the remainder of the disk, define as RAID
4. Create RAID md devices
   • Create a md device for /boot partitions
   • Format with filesystem of choice
   • Mount as /boot
   • Set bootable flag
5. Create additional md devices with remaining partitions
   • Having only one partition to deal with I formatted ext3 and defined a mount point of /
6. Continue with installation after writing the partition table to disk

I prefer to run testing as I’ve only twice had issues and only one of those was fatal. Had my Linux skills been better at the time I might have been able to recover but that was many years ago. After the initial reboot I start to answer questions and cancel out of one. This will provide the installer menu which will allow me to select multiple APT repositories. After selecting the repositories I’ll skip past the software selection screen to just give a bare bones installation. At this point the /etc/apt/sources.list file can be edited for the distribution of choice, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and away ya go.