I have an ABIT IP35 Pro with the ICH9R chipset. I have opensus 11.1 installed on a single drive and I have a BIOS fake raid on two drives that I want to use as a filesystem with Samba.
My problem is that the bios says the RAID is setup correct but it will be rebuilt in the OS. Suse see the drives as seperate. The drives have existing data. What do I need to get these to work together in Suse?
Thanks!
Bump?
I guess linux and this raid type don’t mix?
Hi ericchile,
I have a similar setup, where I have two drives running in RAID 1 configuration via the ICH9R BIOS RAID. When I installed openSUSE 11.1, the installer found the array via the dmraid driver. In Gnome, the drives do in fact show up as two separate drives, but they are listed as unmounted. I have never tried to mount them. The openSUSE installer added the following line to my /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/isw_djaigfijdd_Volume0_part1 /mnt/array ntfs-3g noatime,user,rw,users,gid=users,umask=0002,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
Note that I don’t think simply adding this line will fix your problem. I think you need to use the dmraid utility to provide the OS with a method for communicating to these drives. As I understand it, BIOS raid solutions really only mark the drives and create some sort of header information on them so that a software utility running in the OS can see them and use them as you need. The array can be mounted somewhere in your root filesystem once dmraid knows which drives to use.
I’m not an expert at this stuff, but I’ll try to help if I can. So I know where you are right now, you can run this command for me and give me the output:
sudo /sbin/dmraid -r
Also, I have SUSE and Windows XP dual booting, so I let Windows do the array initialization stuff. From the dmraid man page, it seems that it should also be able to perform this step. Does this array already contain data or are the drives fresh and unformatted?
Sorry I am still tring to solve this problem.
The drives have data on them, and I dissconnected them during the install process to make sure that the did not get overwritten somehow.
Here is the output.
linux-main:~> sudo /sbin/dmraid -r
root’s password:
/dev/sdc: isw, “isw_echejcaiad”, GROUP, ok, 781422765 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdb: isw, “isw_echejcaiad”, GROUP, ok, 781422765 sectors, data@ 0
Here is my fstab
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST340014AS_5MQ27HM4-part5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST340014AS_5MQ27HM4-part1 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /u01 ntfs-3g user,users,gid=users,fmask=113,dmask=002,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
Any idea what to do next?
OK, looks like dmraid sees the drives you want to be in the array, at least. Run the following
sudo /sbin/dmraid -s -g
This should give you information about the subsets in the array (only one unless you have multiple volumes on those two disks).
Note the subset name, it will be of the form isw_echejcaiad_xxx, where xxx is the name of the volume. If it actually needs to be rebuilt, then issue
sudo /sbin/dmraid -R isw_echejcaiad
Note that even in the case that it doesn’t need to be rebuilt, it is still safe to give that command, as it will simply tell you it is not in a state to be rebuilt.
After this, or in the case that it doesn’t need to be rebuilt, then you should be able to issue this:
sudo /sbin/dmraid -ay
That should activate the volume and create the mapped block devices in /dev/mapper/. After that you should be able to go to the “Disk Partitioning” tool (expert partitioner) in YaST and specify a mount point for any partitions in the volume, which should be listed under Hard Disks as something like isw_echejcaiad_xxx_yyy, where xxx is the volume name and yyy is an indication of the partition. For example partition name, you can look at the fstab entry I gave you.