[clug] How to make my server robust for booting

[Tony Lewis]

All,

I'm rebuilding my home server, and want to make it 'robust' for boot 
purposes.  For example, if a disk fails, the system can continue to 
function until I replace it.

I am testing my ideas in VirtualBox at the moment.

The stuff I think I've sorted are:

  * encrypted RAID1 for /
  * RAID1 for /boot

What I'm stuck on is how to handle a failure of the drive where GRUB is 
installed.  I thought it might be as simple as doing grub-install 
/dev/sd[bcd] (as well as on /dev/sda) and BIOS would just find *a* copy 
of GRUB and be able to continue the boot process.

It's not working in VirtualBox at least.  If I let it boot unaided, it 
cannot find a bootable medium (expected behaviour). If I interrupt that 
with F12 and choose the second hard drive to boot from, it locks up.  It 
might be a VirtualBox thing, and so the physical server would be OK.  Or 
more likely I don't understand what I'm doing.

What's the best way to architect things so that a failed hard drive 
where GRUB is installed, is easily handled?

Tony