l.scorcia,
> I am considering two options, a) moving everything
> inside the raid array and booting from there, or
> b) resizing the RAID array and hosting rootfs on
> one of the disks as a different partition.
>
> The first option would probably be the easiest in
> case of a drive failure as the device would just
> boot from the healthy disk, am I right? Assuming
> that uBoot can boot from an mdraid partition of
> course.
Not exactly. U-Boot does not understand RAID.
In a typical setup, the kernel files uImage/zImage and uInitrd must be stored in flash. And then after the kernel started, it will have the ability to recognized the RAID array to mount the rootfs.
The --metadata approach used by bobafetthotmail is good too.
I would use the 2nd option
if I use RAID. For home use, RAID is way overkilled and brings lots of headache, IMO. For a home network, a good automatic backup procedure with rsync is the simplest to manage.
The rootfs should be separated from the data. And since you already have USB rootfs, you can copy it to the real partition in the 2nd option. And recreate this HDD rootfs at will. The rest of the disk space can be regular partitions, or RAID partitions.
-bodhi
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