Can't Install Opensuse 12.1 on a motherboard controller RAID1 harddisk

Hello. I am trying to install opensuse 12.1 64bits to my computer.
my computer has 2x1TB harddisk. As my motherboard support RAID0 and RAID1. So I created 2 RAID disks.
One 500GB RAID1, use first 500GB of each harddisk.
Another one 1TB RAID0, use left 500GB of each harddisk.
So at last I got 500GB RAID1 and 1TB RAID0 spread on 2 RAID disks.
Now forget that raid0 because it doesn’t matter actually.

I have partitioned the 500GB into 100GB for win7, 50GB for opensuse. and 350GB for data.
I have installed win7 successfully and during install, looks win7 doesn’t recognize it is being installed into a raid harddisk. Actually when I use partition magic, it doesn’t show the real harddisks below the RAID. My motherboad raid controller hides everything.

This afternoon, I start to install opensuse. After booting from dvd, went to partition choose step. It shows my raid harddisk as /dev/mapper/pdc_*** things like. I choose the correct partition and continue to install. It warning me my linux is above 128GB may can not boot. I am not sure. My win7 use first 100G. Then follow opensuse. Should still in 100G-150GB, not above 128G. Anyway, continue install. After install finish, it said need to restart. Then install process hangs. I remember on my laptop, it should start the X system again to let me configure something. But now, it just goes down and hangs there. Then I manually restart. Bios remind me “Operation System missing, can’t boot”. Looks grub was not installed to anywhere. I use DVD to boot again and goes into rescue mode, I want to reinstall grub. But when I logged into the rescue system. fidsk only show my 2 real harddisks. No raid disks are showing. So no where to install.

What should I do?

thanks.
Regards.
Scott

Those ‘mother board’ RAID chips are not real RAID they are BIOS assisted RAID also known as FAKE RAID. Some will work with Linux some will not since they require external drivers. Real hardware RAID is transparent to the OS ie the hardware does all the work. So if this is a pure Linux installation use Software RAID.

Thanks for replying.

I did a risky try tonight.

I reboot into the rescue mode and use fdisk -l to check the disk partition. I see actually fdisk is showing the first 500GB of my 2 harddisks. Which actually is my RAID1. It shows 2 harddisks with same partition table. I need to try. So I mount my linux partition sda2 and reset grub on it. Then reboot. It works. Now I’m in opensuse. Just I have no user created.

So the issue is during the installation, after finish, when opensuse need me to configure, the installation process hangs. I did tried to install twice and it hanged twice. So it doesn’t get a chance to set up grub. After manually set up grub. it works.

Corresponding to my fstab, the raid1 and raid 0 partitions are correctly mount into my /windows/E and /windows/D

/dev/disk/by-id/raid-pdc_edjhgcda-part2 / ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/raid-pdc_edjhgcda-part1 /windows/C ntfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/raid-pdc_edjhgcda-part3 /windows/D ntfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/raid-pdc_feddajbi-part1 /windows/E ntfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

Just now on nautilus, all partitions on my RAID1 disk shows as mountable disks, it is a bit annoying.

Yes. I guess my mother board raid controller is a “Fake raid” too. Because in win7, it need to install raid drivers too.

Thanks.
Problem solved.

Regards.
Scott

In your bios, do you have the option, boot from RAID?