Ubuntu on a Dell: RAIDers of the Lost Disk

Quick and to the point: the software RAID, despite booting properly and having everything appear to work, is useless. I disconnected the second disk in the RAID1 array and the OS refused to boot. I have no idea why. I think this has gone far beyond frustrating at this point. If I'm left with a RAID1 system that can't even boot if a disk is missing then there's no point having it the first place and I want my 250GB back.

My next step will be, having convinced the owner of the system to try out a proper hardware RAID card, to see if a hardware RAID1 will overcome these problems. I'll have to look into it some more first of course and I'll see if I can work out what is going wrong with the software implementation.

I also promise that not every post in the future will be about RAID!

UPDATE: A new plan has been formulated! I'm going to attempt separating out the /boot partition from mdadm's clutches and then using [rsync][1] to make sure that both /boot partitions on each disk are kept in sync. Let's see if that works.

[1]: http://rsync.samba.org/