Confused about Linux not seeing RAID disks

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

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This is somehting that has been a very confusing one for me here.

I get it with EVERY single Motherboard I have and even the few RAID cards that I have do the same thing.

I only get it with Linux, but Windows is fine.

Right now I am working with an EVGA 680I Motherboard and a pair of Seagate 320GB Hard Disks.

They are both connected to SATA 0 and 1 respectively and they are currently in a Striped array, running Windows Vista Premium 64Bit and they have C: as a 50GB and D: a 520GB.

This array is just fine under Windows, and I have also toyed with XP and XP64 like this and its just peachy.

The snag is, that I have tried to install a few flavours of Linux, MiNT, Ubuntu, Debian, and then just in case its a debian issue, I have also had a go with both SuSE ( 10.3 ) and Fedora ( 13 ) but they are all doing tha same thing.

They all still see the 2 drives and not the array.

The snag here is that ( I have tried in the past ) I can fully install Linux onto the seperate drives, or onto one or both and it goes on fully but then it fails to work of course because the Motherboard sees the RAID but since the data will now all be corrupted, it fails to boot, even if I remove the RAID info.

Basically I just want to run a Linux PC on a RAID array.

How can I do it?

I have a stupid number of different boards that I can choose from but they all pretty much do the same thing.
 
Most of the above link seems to be talking about Linux software RAID (from a quick skim) but that is not likely to be the case here.

It is more likely to be hardware assisted software raid (aka fakeraid) which is well known to be a pain in the butt to get Linux installed on. A possible link to look at related to this is here but as it could well be an nvidia raid chipset it could make it even more complicated.
 
Thanks for the link EssexRaptor, it looks interesting, but it seems ( I have only skipped so I may be wrong ) to be about Raid once I have already set up a linux system rather than the situation I feel that I am in now, which is why Linux ignores a Raid setup during the installation process.

Its as if I need to Pressing F6 during the installation process!!! LOL

MeMyselfAndI:
Hmm yes, but while the EVGA is a nVidia chipset, as are a couple of the 939 boards I have tried, the rest are mostly Intel Chipsets and there is no difference at all in how they are both doing the thing they are doing.

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What I am thinking is simply that under Windows, this RAID setup is showing up as 5.9 in the index score and thats great, however, so do the 1TB Drives when used on their own.

I might as well just use one of those insteead, they are the same speed as the basic Raid setup, and besides, if I am having this much trouble, then what will happen if the array goes iffy?

Im probably going to get myself into worse trouble than its actually worth just to get a little bit extra speed.

--

I think I should give it a miss really, so cheers guys.
 
FatRakoon said:
What I am thinking is simply that under Windows, this RAID setup is showing up as 5.9 in the index score and thats great, however, so do the 1TB Drives when used on their own.
Click to expand...

memyselfandi is right, fakeraid sucks (and nvidia fakeraid probably plain doesnt work) and on linux software raid is much much prefered. Anyways raid0 for performance on HDD is fairly useless, a single cheap SSD will batter them for benchmarking (since you seem to worry about windows scores ;-))

Wait you have two OCZ SSDs, use that for perf, use the normal drives for storage or raid1 ;-)
 
Yeah, I a ma fanny at times.

I noticed on 2 of my machines now, that 2x320GB Drives give 5.9 but so does one of the 1TB Drives.

I have done a lot of shuffling about recently with Hard Disks, and Im just mostly kind of titting about really.

The PC I have been using as my Server is now replaced fully with a NAS box. It has a pair of 2TB Drives in there, and the Server is now just another plaything that I have in the LAN but I have used 2x320WD Drives in that and its fine like that.

I still have another 2x320GB WD and 2x320GB Seagate ( originally I bought the 4 WD Drives to MIRROR & STRIPE and it was fun but ultimately only a show off point for myself not really useful to be honest )

The SSD's are on my master PC. They are only 32GB and so thats why I am using the 2 - not for the speed, but because 32GB is too small for SVR 2008

I will be putting Win7 back on however and when I do that, I will be going back to just one SSD and using the other SSD in my No.2

I seem to worry about windows scores? yes and no. I have 2 PCs and one shows a 5.1 HD score and the other shows 5.7 and yet the PC with the 5.1 score is clearly a faster machine in every way, it boots in a good 4 to 5 seconds quicker and every game & program loads quicker too, so I know to never take any form of benchmark as gospel, but still... I like to see high numbers... dont you? LOL
 
It's very little help, but I failed woefully to get windows and linux installed to the same motherboard raid. I wasted a good few days on that.

As another nice joke, I also couldn't put the OS on a single drive if I put four other drives into a raid 5. The damned board refused to try to boot from anything other than the raid.

That marked the end of my trying to use Intel's raid. mdadm is excellent, the pseudo hardware stuff isn't.
 
JonJ678 said:
That marked the end of my trying to use Intel's raid. mdadm is excellent, the pseudo hardware stuff isn't.
Click to expand...

Well intel even reckons real hardware raid is not all that needed anymore... After seing hardware raid cards die with lost drives with no recovery options because no one knew the stripe size or even the raid level... I kind of agree.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/15/sas_in_patsburg/
 
Yes, I had a raid card ( I think I still have it somewhere ) and when I build a RAID array on that card, I cannot move it to somewhere else, however, when I do one on a Mobo I can.

So, yes, hardware raid might well have some advantages, but compatibility it does not.
 
BIOS asisted software RAID (or fakeraid) has been a pain in the backside until relatively recently.

I use fedora, and since version 12 its had an option during install to chose advance disk configuration/ iScsi and my on board Intel ICHR RAID0 array is recognised fine and just works.

No idea what other distros have been doing on this front though.

E-I
 
brendan said:
memyselfandi is right, fakeraid sucks (and nvidia fakeraid probably plain doesnt work) and on linux software raid is much much prefered. Anyways raid0 for performance on HDD is fairly useless, a single cheap SSD will batter them for benchmarking (since you seem to worry about windows scores ;-))

Wait you have two OCZ SSDs, use that for perf, use the normal drives for storage or raid1 ;-)
Click to expand...

I think people always miss the fact that software RAID on linux doesn't really solve the problem with a multiboot system as then windows won't be able to read the linux partitions etc. Getting faikeraid to work correctly in both windows and Linux is much better and is acheivable!

Also in my opinion Raid0 on mecanical hard drives is worthwhile. Not as fast as SSD, but considerably cheaper and more space.
 
Evil-I said:
I think people always miss the fact that software RAID on linux doesn't really solve the problem with a multiboot system as then windows won't be able to read the linux partitions etc. Getting faikeraid to work correctly in both windows and Linux is much better and is acheivable!
Click to expand...

Fair enough. I dont share drives between windows/linux...

Btw for fakeraid look here at boards supported. ICH10R is fairly well supported and has been for a while so it's no surprise it works ;-)

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/RAID/Onboard#Tested_Hardware
 
No, I have never dual booted and I always have a Pc setup as one or the other... Never done both.

Well, ok I did once, some years ago to have a play about, but I just never saw the use of it since I always have my main PC running 24/7

Id have liked to get this done, but its fine.
 
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