[lug] Linux Raid question

[Ed Meyer]

I apologize for this being so long...

I just rebuilt my server last night.  My intention was to link 4 of the drives as a raid 5 for data security.  My new setup is a PII 266 with 256 MB Ram and 5 Quantum 6.4GB drives.  I have the first drive on the IDE 0 and is "hda" the boot drive.  I want to take the other 4 (on a separate PCI IDE controller) and make a raid 5.  I want to make the raid partition one large samba partition for file storage from other linux/windows machines.

In the raid how-to it says to make your /etc/raidtab file look like this:

<snip>
device  /dev/sdb1
disk    0
device  /dev/sdc1
disk    1
device  /dev/sdd1
disk    3
</snip>

so I created my /etc/raidtab file using my multiple IDE disks like this:

<snip>
device  /dev/hdb1
disk    0
device  /dev/hdc1
disk    1
device  /dev/hdd1
disk    2
device  /dev/hde1
disk    3
</snip>

But when I do "mkraid /dev/md0" it says:

couldn't open device hdb1 - device not configured
mkraid aborted, see the syslog and /proc/mdstat for clues

First I checked to see if I had an hdb1 in my /dev folder and not only did I have one, I had hdb through hdb16.  But I also had and hda(1-16) and an hdb (1-16) all the way through hdh(1-16).  I only have 5 hard drives in the machine.  How am I getting a-h drives?  Why are there so many partitions (1-16)?

Also I noticed when I did the RH6.1 install it only recognized hda, hdb, hdc in disk druid and I only made two partitions (swap and "/" on hda).

The results of a cat /proc/mdstat give me this:

personalities:
read_ahead not set
unused devices: <none>

So I have a feeling I need to do something else to the raid first that's not mentioned in the how-to.  Or I have to recompile my kernel with raid on.  How do I check to see if my kernel already has raid on?

Also - how to I see what happened during the boot process?  The boot.log file doesn't start until syslogd is started, but the hard drives are initialized way before that.  Is that logged anywhere or can I turn a capture on somehow?

Also how do I see if my extra IDE card is working?  Maybe that's my problem since HDA is on the first IDE bus, the CD Rom is on the second IDE bus and the last 4 drives on are a PCI IDE card.

Thanks!
Ed Meyer