Hardware RAID on Opensuse -- HELP!

English Hardware
1

Hey guys,

I recently bought a new computer, with an Intel P5Q SE/R mother board. I wanted RAID 1, and the mbo had it onboard.

I configured the RAID in the Intel setup, and got it working fine. I then installed Windows XP, got it setup fine… All seemed good, until I stuck in the OpenSuSE 11.0 DVD to install.

I was expecting some problems with the partitioning, but had been assured by other linux gurus that it should pick up the RAID fine. Wrong. It does recognise that there is some RAID, (it sees some RAID device), but doesn’t put the partitions already there in the right places. It sees Windows C drive as being on one disk, then a non-existant D drive as being on the other disk. I have done a lot of partitioning before, but it is really really confusing! :\

I’ve been reading around, and am still not sure whether there actually is anything that will make it work on Linux - there seem to be a lot of software RAID solutions, but not many hardware RAID solutions.

From my reading around, there seem to be a couple options - please add if you have other ideas:

  1. Stick in another drive, install OpenSuSE onto it, build the kernel modules (?), install other drivers (?), then port the whole chabang to a partition on the RAID volume.
  2. Try to get the RAID working from the installation partitioning.
  3. Don’t install OpenSuSE (definitely not where I want to go… seeing as I hate Windows :))

Can anyone give any advice on what to do? How to do the partitioning? Programs for Intel hardware RAID under Linux? ANY HELP! Please!

Thanks guys,

Scott

2

I have software RAID openSUSE 11.0 on one of my machines, and the primary reason I went software was because of the exact point you made about their being very little to go on with help for hardware RAID. One of the reasons will be that to use hardware RAID the correct driver needs to be used - have you checked the intel website for a downloadable linux RAID driver? As you know XP can’t recognise RAID without inserting the floppy disk with RAID drivers and loading it on start. Otherwise it will see either no HDD’s or both as seperate. I imagine without the proper driver it’s really not going to happen for you - SUSE will only see two separate drives as well. On the other hand unlike many other distros openSUSE can perform a software RAID installation - and it works very nicely indeed. Other distros help on RAID have consisted of effectively cloning the various partitions and then writing the RAID array data to the disks afterwards in a fairly long and quite daunting process even for the average geek!
The only issue I have with my RAID setup is it is still not using UUID’s for the HDD’s in fstab, and it only writes grub to first HDD - what this means is if you change the order in the bios or move cables around physically etc etc and what was /dev/sda now gets given /dev/sdb then it will simply not boot!

I wonder if it would be possible to have the hardware RAID running XP and openSUSE running software RAID and boot between them? I currently just run XP under virtualbox inside my openSUSE software RAID install and it does everything I need it to do without a drama. You might consider that as an option as well.

If you do manage to get hardware RAID working without topping yourself, post up what you did for the benefit of us all =)

3

Hey solphonic, thanks for the reply. :slight_smile:

I have checked the websites (the motherboard is one of those wierd ASUS/Intel ones), but can’t really find any drivers anywhere - looks like both seem to think that the other should be providing them. There are “Intel Matrix Storage Manager” drivers on the Intel website, but nothing else.

On the install CD I got with the motherboard there are the drivers, and a linux section, but no RAID drivers in it. Argh! >:(

I started up the openSuSE install yesterday again, and am still just as confused. It doesn’t recognise the RAID really, although it comes up with one “existing partition” as being a RAID “Volume0” mountpoint. So it can see it, but just not work with it.

Tried the “install extra addon products” option, and then stuck the CD in, but it, as expected, didn’t recognise anything.

So, as I see it, there are few options, most of which I am still confused about. Let me list them:

(1) Wipe the Windows, install openSuSE, and use software RAID. A waste of the expensive motherboard. Then I can try to use virtual box (?) or something else to run windows under it.
Questions: a) how good is the openSuSE software RAID?
b) will using virtualbox affect the performance of Windows?

(2) Keep the Windows install with the hardware RAID, and install openSuSE with the same setup except with software raid, on the same drives. Dual boot setup.
Questions: a) will that even work? are the two compatible to work together? or will you just end up with two stuffed drives?

(3) Keep the Windows, install openSuSE onto another disk, find some linux drivers for the RAID, if they exist, install them and/or build kernel support for it. Then port it to the RAID array. I have the feeling that this won’t work.
Questions: a) how do you go about “building kernel support” for it? I’ve heard all these people on forums going on about it, but how?

(4) Keep Windows, and do virtualbox with openSuSE. Not preferable personally, cause you are working off the Windows platform.

Anyone? Thanks!

4

hey mate

it’s definitely not a walk in the park trying to achieve what you are here!

I’ll give my opinions on your 4 points

  1. Probably the simplest option but yeah I see your point about waste of a good motherboard. Note that the raid controller is on your mobo then it is probaly a fake raid. This is different than having a raid controller card and most people report little success with linux. The other thing is that with fake RAID (to the best of my knowledge) your CPU is still taking the hit in terms of dealing with writing to both drives simultaneously. Whereas a dedicated controller card actually does the work and keeps the CPU free of all that.
    a) I’ve only had my software RAID install for a short time but it seems as solid as a rock - if anyone is going to do RAID well it will be Novell I would reckon. Of course there MUST be a performance hit, but i honestly haven’t noticed any significant reduction in performance to when i just had a single drive install =)
    b) quite likely - so it depends on what your doing with it. If you have heaps or RAM then allocate plenty to it and plenty of video memory. Experiment with enabling 3d acceleration and see which peforms better. I have it and can run fruityloops albeit with a fairly large buffer to avoid underruns but it still goes. I generally just use it to get full res printouts on my canon pixma printer though so that’s a no brainer. If your thinking games then forget it. If your thinking video editing then forget it. If your thinking an accounting or some other non performance intensive program that has to run on windows then it should be absolutely fine!

  2. Couldn’t tell you if that would work…i can’t see it being easy to get going. Something that might take a fair bit of time I imagine. Prolly wouldn’t work if you had to resize the windows partition for obvious reasons.

  3. This could work but once again would be very interesting to get going. In terms of building support into the kernel I imagine they mean just creating a custom kernel with the driver embedded rather than just a module…which is really quite easy once you’ve done it a few times, but there is no point if the driver isn’t available.

  4. I wouldn’t =) I try to abosultely everything I can under linux because it is more secure and stable and generally does it better…if I can’t then I use windows but onyl as a last resort

good luck, hopefully someone with more experience than me can give you some more pointers.

andy

5

If you paid a lot more for your motherboard because it had fake raid on it, then you paid over the odds for it. A real hardware raid controller can cost as much as a motherboard. It’s justified in production situations because you don’t have to call in an expert to run mdadm to rebuild the raid. You just swap in a good drive and it rebuilds.

Software raid in LInux works fine and doesn’t take much CPU power. One advantage with software raid is that you are not up the creek if your fake raid controller blows up and you find that no replacement can be found. But you do have to read up on mdadm, hopefully before an emergency.

If there is no Linux driver for your fake raid, I don’t think it’s looking hopeful for being able to run raid with both Linux and Windows. You’ll have to either splash out for a real hardware raid controller, or run one OS inside the other. Dual booting is a PITA anyway.

6

Ok, thanks a lot andy. The pity is that I would mostly be wanting to do video editing with Premiere and gaming (Halo, Call of Duty 4, etc) on the Windows system - which is exactly what all the virtual machines can’t handle… Have to look at it from a different perspective then.

Thanks for the help - it’s good to just know that there is someone else out there!

7

I didn’t pay that much more for it, I guess half again the motherboard cost. Darn that sales rep - he told me that it was hardware RAID and told me that it would work with Linux…

I’m thinking what I’ll do now is setup OpenSuSE with software RAID on the daul 500GB drives, then get another smaller hard drive and install windows onto it, to be able to do the gaming and video editing that I want to be able to, and still have the RAID to protect all the docs on Linux.

I could possibly have a partition of the RAID volume as a filesystem that would be viewable/writable from Windows to save any documents from Windows onto. Would that work?

Thanks for all the help guys

8

I don’t think you will be able to export the RAID partition to Windows, even R/O because the signature of the partition is RAID, not ext3. The ext3 partition is contained inside the RAID partition.

And you couldn’t export R/W because it wouldn’t be RAID, you would be only modifying one element of the RAID leading to inconsistency next Linux boot.

9

Ok ken,

Thanks for that, thought it might be the case. Do you think that having openSuSE on the RAID then windows on a secondary disk and dual booting would be the best compromise though?

10

My preference would be Windows in a VM, but since you use it for gaming and video editing, maybe that’s not such a good idea.

You can mount the NTFS partition from Linux RW no problems with ntfs-3g so that would do you for interchange.

11

Yeah I agree with the above. Good idea to put windows on a separate single drive and do a software RAID with openSUSE on another 2. Just make sure your windows drive is fairly large for all your video editing needs. As ken_yap stated, read/write ntfs access is easy under linux, whereas M$ refuses to acknowledge that it might be possible for a different filesystem other than fat32 or ntfs to exist and therefore wouldn’t recognise your OpenSUSE partitions =)

12

Promise 378 RAID problem
Hello

When i want to install open suse 11.1 in partiton tool says me that port is DM_RAID but see 2 disks not 1. (i have an mirror).
I have drivers on floppy and he copy them (F6 on start installation), but nothing happend!
In partiton tool In RAID see nothing!>:(>:(>:(

I set up by F6 and then load driver from floppy. I now saw that my drivers are for opensuse 8.1 and 8.2, can that be problem?
Help

13

Ok, thanks for all the help guys. I’ll just get another 500gb drive (sigh… there goes the budget) and do windows on it. Cheers!