Setting up SWRAID 5 partitions can be painful and having too many mds isn’t generally a good idea. Instead you can use LVM to do this.
The snippet below is from a working kickstart config from a 4-disk server.
zerombr yes
clearpart –all –initlabel
bootloader –location=mbr –append=”console=tty0 console=ttyS0″
# /dev/md0
part raid.01 –size 1 –grow –ondisk=sda
part raid.02 –size 1 –grow –ondisk=sdb
part raid.03 –size 1 –grow –ondisk=sdc
part raid.04 –size 1 –grow –ondisk=sdd
# /dev/md1
part raid.05 –size 100 –ondisk=sda
part raid.06 –size 100 –ondisk=sdb
part raid.07 –size 100 –ondisk=sdc
part raid.08 –size 100 –ondisk=sdd
# /dev/md2
part raid.09 –size 4096 –ondisk=sda
part raid.10 –size 4096 –ondisk=sdb
part raid.11 –size 4096 –ondisk=sdc
part raid.12 –size 4096 –ondisk=sdd
raid /boot –fstype ext3 –level=1 –device=md1 raid.05 raid.06 raid.07 raid.08
raid swap –fstype swap –level=5 –device=md2 raid.09 raid.10 raid.11 raid.12
raid pv.01 –level=5 –device=md0 raid.01 raid.02 raid.03 raid.04
volgroup VGBASE pv.01
logvol / –fstype=ext3 –vgname=VGBASE –percent 2 –name=ROOT
logvol /var –fstype=ext3 –vgname=VGBASE –percent=2 –name=VAR
logvol /tmp –fstype=ext3 –vgname=VGBASE –percent=2 –name=TMP
logvol /opt –fstype=ext3 –vgname=VGBASE –percent=20 –name=OPT
logvol /opt/local –fstype=ext3 –vgname=VGBASE –percent=2 –name=OPT_LOCAL
logvol /opt/oracle –fstype=ext4 –vgname=VGBASE –size=1 –grow –name=OPT_ORACLE
