Tools that manage md devices can be found at http://www..kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/raid/.... You can boot (if you selected boot support in the configuration) with your md device with the following kernel command lines: for old raid arrays without persistent superblocks: md=,,,,dev0,dev1,...,devn for raid arrays with persistant superblocks md=,dev0,dev1,...,devn md device no. = the number of the md device ... 0 means md0, 1 md1, 2 md2, 3 md3, 4 md4 raid level = -1 linear mode 0 striped mode other modes are only supported with persistant super blocks chunk size factor = (raid-0 and raid-1 only) Set the chunk size as 4k << n. fault level = totally ignored dev0-devn: e.g. /dev/hda1,/dev/hdc1,/dev/sda1,/dev/sdb1 A possible loadlin line (Harald Hoyer ) looks like this: e:\loadlin\loadlin e:\zimage root=/dev/md0 md=0,0,4,0,/dev/hdb2,/dev/hdc3 ro