me, noob, first foray into Linux world
Installing openSUSE on old “mule” machine (test drive of Linux); Chainteck 6BTM mobo (i440BX chipset), PII 233, 0.75G RAM, 4 x 0 (WD400 - BB series) RAID via Promise FastTrak 100 PCI>IDE. BIOS cannot boot from PCI RAID or USB.
Setup RAID while installing SUSE; everything ok except booting.
Is there a floppy (iso?), that could “permanently” reside in FDD, that could boot then re-direct to RAID?
On 2012-01-09 20:16, celticbrooder wrote:
> Is there a floppy (iso?), that could “permanently” reside in FDD, that
> could boot then re-direct to RAID?
If you use lilo and set it up manually yourself, perhaps. Grub? Not that I
know. Not enough space on a floppy.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
any tips on where to find a “how to”? (been in linux world for about 4 days)
On 2012-01-09 23:16, celticbrooder wrote:
>
> any tips on where to find a “how to”? (been in linux world for about 4
> days)
No, sorry. It is not that easy.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
If the BIOS cannot boot off the RAID, one way is to install a separate small HD for the /boot partition. I assume it’s a hardware RAID controller. The CPU is underpowered by today’s standards as is and I wouldn’t want to put the load of software RAID on it. I hope you were only hoping to use it as a NAS or some similar server, there isn’t much else I can think of that it’s powerful enough for.
Using fakeRAID (where the RAID hardware does not have its own processor, but uses driver software and the system CPU) is generally less efficient and much more difficult than using the softRAID that is inbuilt in Linux.
Systemd, as distributed on the openSuSE-12.1 DVD and CDs iis incompatible with RAID. This seems to be fixed when you apply the On-Line Update (a normal part of the install process), but we are not yet 100% sure.
I recommend that you disable RAID in the BIOS.
If you want to use RAID with this hardware, it can be configured as part of the installation (edit partitions).
By pressing <F5> at the initial boot menu screen you can select sysvinit, which gets round the systamd problem.
Sysvinit can later be permanently added as a boot parameter if necessary.
I think the most fundamental question would be: what level of RAID are trying to run? If you set the HDDs as a single RAID 5, sorry, you’re not going to make that happen.
That being said, you can set your partitions as such that a RAID 1 partition will allow you to boot (the BIOS will see one of the drives as a single “normal” partition). You can then get creative with additional partitions over your hard drives.
I, too, would question the horsepower that you have available with this setup to really do anything useful, but it would be sufficient to play around with openSuSE. There are a lot of resources on the net that describe the details, some even very excruciatingly, as to all the factors to be considered when trying to utilize soft RAID with Linux.
set during SUSE install to RAID 0 x 4, controller BIOS sees array1 but SUSE saw 4 different HDD (sda, sdb, sdc, sdd)…
looks like I will have to go with the 5th HDD (C drive on mobo IDE 0) for boot, and muddle my way through designating the RAID 0 for everything else.
(getting "GRUB loading, please wait… Error 21)
On 2012-01-10 02:06, ken yap wrote:
> I assume it’s a hardware RAID
> controller.
A real hardware raid controller should appear as a single disk to the
operating system, transparently. A fake raid would not, and cause problems.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
The hardware was described in the first post. It is a fake RAID card with dual IDE channels and four attached drives.
As a fake the card could only support mirroring and striping.
It can usefully work as two IDE channels to connect the four drives.
There is not enough CPU power to support error-correcting soft RAID and do useful work, but it should cope with Lnux kernel striping or mirroring.
The system load of Linux soft striping is probably significantly less than that provided by the manufacturer’s driver.
Agreed, it’s a Promise FastTrak 100(TX); will go to plan B: 2 x HDD on mobo IDE 0 and do fresh install of SUSE, and, at the apropriate stage of install, designate both as RAID 0… will see what happens.
FWIW, was playing and mobo read 1G of RAM (4 x lo-density 258’s)… may help a bit)
thanks fo the help (really want to get Linux rolling… and ditch Vista 
nuts… won’t let me RAID the two HDDs
what is the minimum size HDD to install openSUSE? (trying “plan c”… minimum size “c” drive, then add raid for bulk of the work… ?)
If just /boot, a couple of hundred M is plenty. If you want to put / on it, 20-30G is fine.
10GB is plenty if you don’t need entertainment.
I still look after a few low specification machines that are in daily use for data entry and retrieval, web browsing, and report writing etc. They run openSuSE-11.4 KDE-4.7.3. You do not have to install everything. Intel P3 700MHz, 256MiB RAM, i845 graphics 10GB HDD.
The users do not differentiate between them and the new machines – they all have the same modern sceens, mice, and keyboards.
Here is the current disc usage of my 12.1 test machine, running KDE-4.8rc2 VirtualBox-4.1.8 and kernel-3.2.0
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 reiserfs 20G 479M 20G 3% /
/dev/sdb1 reiserfs 20G 479M 20G 3% /root2
/dev/md0 reiserfs 12G 3.8G 8.3G 31% /usr
/dev/md1 btrfs 14G 509M 12G 5% /var
/dev/md2 reiserfs 259G 42G 217G 16% /home
On 2012-01-10 17:06, eng-int wrote:
>
> The hardware was described in the first post.
Yes, but I do not know the exact description of all hardware.
> There is not enough CPU power to support error-correcting soft RAID and
> do useful work, but it should cope with Lnux kernel striping or
> mirroring.
There is power enough, I have done it with much less. Linux was not
invented yesterday, nor raid. However, don’t expect much.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
really goin nutty… installed a 40G on mobo IDE0 (“C”), the other 4 40’s are on the Fasttrak 100 (PCI/IDE)… trying to tell SUSE not to use the 4 running on the PCI/IDE controller (mebbe just unplug the 4 HDDs and force everything to IDE0)
ultimately, this machine is just going to be a “mule”… running downloads (that can take all night, for all I care)… mebbe pop in a tv tuner card (to record something interesting on occasion) and play airwave/net broadcast radio
screew it… aborted, pulled the plug of the 4 40’s, leave the Fasttrak PCI/IDE (so the drivers load), do a full install on the solo IDE0 then reconnect and see if I can make some haedway
Well I hope energy is cheap where you live, and you’re doing this because you don’t want to buy hardware or just want to play around, because all that can be done more efficiently on a modern ARM based box connected to a TB sized HD. As for TV broadcasts, you can get off the shelf DVB recorders quite cheap now, thanks to mass production.
It won’t be as educational though.