PCI -> SATA -> RAID1 -> LVM -> ext3

Getting this wonderful setup took quite a bit of troubleshooting, so I thought I’d share my instructions. Note that my root partition is not on this disk (it’s on another SCSI (hardware) RAID array (/dev/sda).

• Update all BIOS/firmware (my BIOS didn’t deal with the PCI SATA card until the BIOS was upgraded).
• Create single large partitions on each of my two SATA disks (fdisk). Set the type to 0xfd (Linux RAID autodetect).
• Add the modules for my SATA/RAID PCI card to /etc/modules. Also add sd_mod, md_mod, my SATA module (sata_sil), and raid1.
• apt-get install mdadm lvm2
• Alter /etc/mdadm.conf:
  DEVICE /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
  ARRAY /dev/md0 devices=/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdc1
• Create the RAID array with mdadm
  mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level raid1 –raid-devices=2 –spare-devices=0 –auto=yes /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
• Reboot and `cat /proc/mdstat` to make sure the drives are active and sync’ing.
• Create the physical volume.
  pvcreate /dev/md0
• Create the volume group.
  vgcreate MYVGNAME /dev/md0
• Create the logical volume
  lvcreate -L120G -n mylvname MYVGNAME
• Make my filesystem
  mke2fs -j /dev/MYVGNAME/mylvname
• Mount my new filesystem
  mount -t ext3 /dev/MYVGNAME/mylvname /mnt

PHEW!