I have setup quite a few raids in linux and currently run a 1TB raid on my home/business server. Setting up the raid is not very hard but can be confusing at times when you are first learning. What I can do for you is list the steps involved and you can go thru and make sure everything is good to go.
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First thing is first. Make sure the drives have NO partitions on them. You can do this by going into fdisk for each drive and deleteing all partitions on the drives (D command in fdisk). Make sure you hit W after you are done to write changes to disk. Also, What gets some is that you might need to re-read the partition tables on the drives after you are done otherwise they will show up like you never edited them. To have linux reread the tables issue the following command:
or for a particular drive:
Now go into fdisk and make your partitions. On mine I just made ext2 partitions but you might want to make gpt partitions if your going to do a raid device larger than 3tb I do believe. Otherwise stuff like windows may not recognize the whole array. The choice is up to you. Linux will work on almost any type of partition as long as they are all the same (IMHO). Remember to (W)rite your changes in fdisk.
After all the drives are partitioned we will make the raid. In your case you are building a raid5 with 5 disks.
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=raid5 --force /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1
(gee, what is your boot drive??)
after that is all done we can now format the raid
To make it available to mount, add the following to /etc/fstab:
/dev/md0 /mymountpoint ext3 defaults 0 0
Now mount that sucker!
Lets make sure that the raid starts on bootup otherwise you will have to assemble it manually everytime you boot.
mdadm --detail --scan --verbose > /etc/mdadm.conf
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Below are some helpful commands:
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To remove a failed drive from the array:
mdadm /dev/md0 -r /dev/sda1
To add a drive to the array:
mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda1
To remove a spare drive from array that has failed:
mdadm /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sdXX
To see which drive has failed, type this
To manually assemble your raid if you rebooted without mdadm.conf file. Or something weird happened.
mdadm --assemble --force /dev/md1 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
Manually stop a array:
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Hope this all helped.
