I'm puzzled by Intel BIOS-RAID ...

English Hardware
#1

hi,

I just wanted to install 11.1 on a brand new motherboard - Intel DX58SO. It has Intel MAtrix RAID controller and Marvell SATA controller. Actually it was detected as AHCI.

This is a BIOS-RAID - a so called fake raid. Anyway, I gave it a try and created two RAID-0 volumes, one for openSUSE and one for Vista.

During installation the partitioner gave me a choice of four hard drives:

/dev/mapper/raid_xyz_vol0
/dev/mapper/raid_xyz_vol1
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb

it looks like fake raids were detected in some way and described as DM RAID.

Question: can I use those volumes for installation or it wont boot??

thanks in advance!

#2

ok, I reply to myself.

yes, autodetected DM raid devices can to be used to install linux.

the only trick is to fix devices.map file for grub. this can be done after initial configuration and while installation program installs RPMs to your new partitions. just switch to any text consoles and edit /mnt/boot/grub/devices.map to contain paths based on /dev/mapper/ instead of /dev/disk/.

#3

If you install to raid in an Intell Matrix though, you cannot rebuild the new drive if you lose a drive.

Basically it is worthless. The matrix bios does not rebuild the drive.

It will prompt you to add the drive to the raid then tell you the operating system will rebuild the drive. NICE!

What is the whole point of putting a raid controller on the board?

opensuse can’t find the volume to boot the root volume.

>:(

I installed on an aberdeen x419 (BIG server).

Found out how worthless the matrix really is.

#4

I have installed a RAID1 on an ICH10R X58 board from gigabyte.
I have a hardware problem with one disk.
Unfortunately I cannot remove it unless I have another one.
Furthermore, since I do not have any Windows partition to install Intel matrix storage console I cannot convert my RAID 1 to a recovery volume which would allow me to remove safely the damaged drive…