Jaume Fortuny
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 -- Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Rainer Koenig Project Manager Linux Business Clients Fujitsu Siemens Computers VP BC E SW OS Phone: +49-821-804-3321 Fax: +49-821-804-2131