GRUB legacy, "savedefault" and RAID 1 - confused

[drbob]

Hello,

I've been reading the GRUB manual as I set up my raid 1 array: md0 is 
the /boot partition (made up of sda1 and sdb1)

As I understand it GRUB 0.97 does not understand RAID at all, it just 
treats sda1 and sdb1 as separate partitions. This led me to think that 
using savedefault would cause my md0 array to degrade as grub would only 
write an updated default file to one of the two partitions that make up md0.

However savedefault *seems* to work fine. I can boot with no degraded 
array messages and the default file in /boot/grub isn't corrupted. Does 
grub legacy actually have some code to deal with RAID 1 after all or am 
I storing up file system problems for the future by using the 
savedefault command in such a setup?

If it's safe to use savedefault I plan to set up a stanza that uses sdb1 
(hd1,0) as GRUB root in the event of sda failing (as described in 
section 4.3.2 of the manual 
<http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Booting-fallback-systems>). 
I'd rather not rely on sdb becoming "hd0" in grub's view - this would 
work if sda failed totally, but what if sda remains visible to the 
system but becomes unreadable (cf click of death etc)?

Thanks in advance for any help.

regards,

drbob