Workarounds for advanced RAID features in GRUB Legacy?

[Leif W]

Hi,

I'm a long-time LILO (both loaders have their merits) and non-RAID user, 
but have recently been fiddling with Linux Software RAID (mdadm) and 
GRUB Legacy configurations (as it's all that is offered with Debian 
testing and Knoppix by default).  I've made progress and understand more 
than I did when I started.  However, there were some problem areas. 
I've checked the manual, FAQ, Bugs for GRUB Legacy and the archives of 
this mailing list.  I found a few things but they apply to RAID1 only if 
I understand correctly (disable raid autodetect and manually specify md, 
or install grub on both discs).  I was wondering if there were any other 
known workarounds or patches for GRUB Legacy, from the ugly or tedious 
to the not-so-bad techniques, any and all.  :-)  Also thrown into the 
mix is WinXP.  Currently storing GRUB on floppy, and manually entering 
config on each boot, to help me learn.

Specific areas:

* RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID5
* Partitionable RAID devices
* Picking the most up-to-date drive

Right now the cleanest option seems to be to simply put a separate ext2 
partition at the beginning of each disc, have a kernel and initrd there 
to handle the RAID setup, and install grub multiple times, and update 
everything manually.  But I have SATA discs, which are treated like SCSI 
discs, and thus have a 16 partition limit instead of the much higher IDE 
limit.  I want to install a few different instances of Linux 
distributions, as well as other operating systems.  And the appropriate 
swap partitions and data partitions.  The only feasible way is to 
utilize partitionable RAID arrays to minimize the primary and logical 
partitions used as I'm pretty close to the limit and have hit it with 
some configurations.

Leif