Thanks for the answers and sorry for not beeing very specific. It's a real hardware raid. The machine is a Supermicro AS-1020A-8B 2 with Bios H8DA8/H8DAR and 2 AMD Opteron Processors and 2Gb of RAM. It has an SCSI controller Adaptec AIC-7902 with two channels and 3 SCSI hard disks Fujitsu MAT3147NC of 147Gb. Through Adaptec HostRAID Bios v4.30 I've created a RAID 1 (Mirror) with 2 of the 3 disks, with the idea of having the operating system in the first drive and using the mirror for data. At this moment, with the provided bios SCSI utility there exist the following configuration: Hard Drive AIC-7902A 0 Fujitsu 147Gb Mirrored(R1) AIC-7902A 1 Adaptec 147Gb The problem that I have is that SuSe 10 can not see the RAID as one single drive. From the operating system I see 2 drives. Can anyone direct me towards a solutions? Thanks again, Jaume Fortuny En/na Rainer Koenig ha escrit:
Jaume Fortuny
writes: Problem in SuSe 10: A RAID 1 array created and recognized by BIOS is not recognized by SuSe10 installation. It appears as 2 separate disks.
Question: Is a driver needed? Or is SuSe 10 not able to recognize a Hardware array?
Can you be a bit more specific about your "hardware RAID"? Is this a real hardware RAID controller or just a thing that pretends to be one? Usually the mainboard "hardware RAID" controllers are just software RAID and need a driver that can read the settings that the BIOS stored somewehere in the NVRAM or on the disks.
The problem with those solutions is that drivers for Linux are very rarely available and they are often just binaries that require a specific kernel version. That means, if you need to upgrade your kernel you will run into problems if you have no binaries for the new kernel available.
Linux itself has a very good software RAID driver in the kernel that you can use and configure with the tools that your Linux distribution brings with it. This software RAID is even capable of doing a RAID 5 with hot spare disks, so you will have a real redundant system that allows you to do a hotplug of the disks and rebuild the array while running the system. The BIOS based "hardware RAID" solutions often just detect that you changed a disk and then do a copy of the remaining disk to the new one, all in your BIOS, you can imagine how long it takes to rebuild a mirror with 80GB. :-)
My personal experience is that Linux software RAID is always the best solution unless you have a real hardware RAID, that means a controller that has the "intelligence" on its silicon and that is just showing one logical block device to the system. But I'm afraid that your controller doesn't have that.
So you can chose if your CPU spends the cycles in a proprietary software RAID driver (if available) or in an open source kernel module that is always available.
HTH Rainer
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