I’m having a bit of an issue getting Suse 11 to install on my system.
I have an Asus Crosshair motherboard (nVidia 590 SLI chipset) with 3 seagate SATA hard disks in a RAID 5 configuration. The system originally had a RAID 1 array, onto which Suse 10.3 installed without problems.
The system has been migrated to RAID 5 and Windows XP is working correctly, however the Suse 11 installer does not recognise the RAID array, rather it lists each disk as an individual drive and lists the partitions but does not recognise the contents.
I’ve checked and it does appear to have loaded the nv_sata module. I’m not spotting any errors in the dmesg output; but as it doesn’t recognise the RAID container, I’m unable to install Suse 11 without the risk of corrupting the RAID array.
Currently I don’t have the space to backup the contents of the Array; so I’m unable to rebuild the array from scratch; however I’m surprised that Suse 11 doesn’t recognise the array when Suse 10.3 did.
Well, this is just a guess re your particular chipset, but I think there’s a chance it’s applicable . . . sata_nv has been replaced by ahci. Take a look at:
I wonder if it’s because the Kernel is using the AHCI module in preference to the sata_nv module. This might explain why it doesn’t appear to be reading the RAID configuration from the BIOS. I’ll try unloading the AHCI module (if possible) and retrying the install.
Ok, I’ve had a look at the loaded modules and unfortunately the AHCI SATA wasn’t one of them. Loading it doesn’t make a difference.
Looking in the Kernel Faqs, the AHCI module is not applicable for the MCP55 chipset on the Crosshair, so it would be using the sata_nv module.
I have to wonder if there’s a switch I need to pass when loading the sata_nv module; but I would have assumed that it would have been detected as it was in Suse 10.3
Installing without the RAID container being recognised WILL break my system; as the data will be written in the wrong format. Believe me, I definitely don’t want to be stuck using just Windows XP on this box.
As a side note, this is the x64 version of OpenSuse 11 that I’m using.
ok, a little more research and it appears that I can use DMRAID to map the RAID container to a device.
My initial experiments at the console in the installer have allowed me to query the RAID container and get back valid info; however these devices don’t appear to be accessible in the installer. From the dmesg output, it still looks like SATA_NV is accessing the hard disks directly.
From reading the DMRAID MAN page, I think there’s a couple of things I can try. It’s likely that I’m either passing an incorrect switch to DMRAID or there is another kernel module I need to load; in order for it to recognise the mapped device.
I’m over my head here, but another guess: SuSE uses the md driver, but your array was created a different driver? (I’m not familiar with dmraid.)
I did have a very-loosely analagous situation: a broken RAID0. I use a mirror as a backup, so I corrected the problem, rebuilt the array, and copied back in to it from the mirror. The same technique could be used for installation, i.e., create the mirror off the array, upgrade the mirror, refresh the array, copy back from the mirror. I know, I know - a kluge, a lot of work, but it would work.