Hello,

I am interested in configuring a RAID-1 mirror on a new system that I 
have just built.  In looking over some of the documentation on the web, 
I have noted that there is some mention of leaving a small portion of 
the disk available for the bootloader at the head of the disk.

http://www.neverland.ch/netbsd/Mirroring.with.NetBSD-1.5.2.txt says
"In the above example, I still have a normal FFS Partition (wd1f) at
   the *beginning* of the disk. It is needed, because installboot (at
   the time of NetBSD 1.5.2) can't correctly write the first- and second
   stage bootloader for booting off a RAID device."

There is also a reference to this FFS partition mentioned at -
http://users.piuha.net/martti/bsd/raid/raid.html

What I am curious about, as I normally let sysinst help with disklabels 
and such, is when it would be most beneficial to define this additional 
partition.

Is this something that I should define when initially installing NetBSD 
on the first disk prior to configuring the RAID device, or is it enough 
to make this change when creating the RAID on the second disk, and just 
allowing the 'reconstruction' to deal with updating the first disk?

Thanks,

Brad