Questions about bootable raid 1 using atacontrol.

[George Hartzell]

Hi,

I have a server running 4.8 on a single disk.  I'd like to set it up
to mirror and be bootable.  Killer performance isn't critical, but
maximal flexibility to frankenstein it together from spare parts is.

So, I'm shying away from hardware raids, and even the pseudo-hardware
raids.

I'd like to just stuff two ata drives in there and use atacontrol to
set them up.

I gather that I can't just cram a second disk into the existing
system, rather I'll have to do dumps to somewhere, set up a raid,
disklabel/newfs, then restore the dumps onto the raid.  Is that an
accurate summary.

Once it's running, how do I recover if/when a disk pukes.  It sounds
like atacontrol's "rebuild" command only works w/ real controllers.
Do I need to boot from a cd and then dd onto the new disk, or???  Do I
need to add the new disk into the raid somehow?

Thanks!

g.