John and all, Thanks for the help. Can you recommend another SATA raid controller for me to stick this beasty? I disabled the VIA bios from any raid configuration and tried it again with same unfortunate result.. Or maybe another mobo? I attempted to turn off that SATA controller in the bios and of course it couldn't do anything because it didn't have any disks. The bios looks to the raid or a scsi to boot from. I'm going to try a special configuration on one disk without raid to see if that does anything before I throw it at the wall. Thanks, Frank John D. Jegla wrote:
Frank,
I believe he is saying that you should use Linux software Raid instead of the cheap fake hardware Raid on your motherboard [edit: re-reading your last post, it's clear that you have already realized this part] - I went through the same learning process the first time I got a supposedly Raid-enabled motherboard. These fake Raid chips need a driver to help them, and those drivers are not typically available for Linux. You must therefore set up your motherboard drive channels/controllers/whatever to be "IDE" or "ATA", NOT "Raid" (this is probably the root of your problem). Then, when you install Suse, during the disk partitioning step (your steps below are essentially correct):
(1) separately create partitions of identical sizes on each disk, setting the partition type to "Linux RAID" for all partitions that you want to Raid together
(2) now create Raid volumes (from the "Raid" button at the bottom), one for each pair of matched partitions (assuming mirroring here), and set those partition types to the filesystem of your choice (I like Reiser myself).
(3) I think you will see an option somewhere to (don't quote me exactly) "write to the boot sectors of both disks" - I did choose to do this on the premise that this would allow either disk to boot independently if the other failed - if this is not what it means then I guess I should feel foolish... :) Note that one of my disks did indeed croak after a while and the system works fine with only the remaining disk.
Notes:
- Yes, you can Raid "/" and "/boot" - don't Raid "swap" partitions - the kernel already handles multiple swap partitions quite well (so do create one of identical size on each disk, just don't Raid them together) - Linux software Raid is faster than the fake hardware Raid on your motherboard anyway - don't feel bad about the whole thing - most motherboards seem to have the fake hardware Raid now anyway, so its not like you lost money on the feature - there are a million recommended partitioning schemes, all with equally good but contradictory reasoning behind them - I think that at least creating a separate partition for "/home" is a good idea, on the theory that you won't risk losing your home directories when upgrading your distribution in "/". With disks your size, I would be tempted to put "/usr" and "/var" in separate partitions as well, but a bit of googling might turn up different schemes that your prefer...
Good luck,
On Tuesday 19 July 2005 7:19 pm, Frank L. Parks wrote:
Alain,
I tried what you said, but I must have missed something. I went through the install again and did the custom partitioning for RAID 1 as you suggested. I must have missed something, because I am getting the same message from GRUB.
I am trying it again and writing down my notes.
1. I clicked on the Partitioning option 2. Selected Create Custom Partition Setup 3. Selected Custom Partitioning For Experts 4. Select Raid -> Edit Raid because it was there from my previous try A. Selected Remove Raid B. Selected Add Raid i. Selected Raid 1 - Mirroring C. Selected Options i. Set to format -> Reiser, Chunk -> 4, Persistent superblock is checked, Mount Point / ii. fstab options: a. Mount by Device Name b. Data Journaling Mode -> ordered c. ACL is checked d. Extended User Attributes is checked D. Added both disks to /dev/md0 5. Expert Partitioner:
/dev/sda 149.0 GB 0 19456 /dev/sda1 862.8 MB Linux Swap Mount swap /dev/sda2 148.1 GB Linux Raid - No Mount Information but is says that it is used by /dev/md0
/dev/sdb 149.0 GB 0 19456 /dev/sdb1 862.8 MB Linux Swap Mount swap /dev/sdb2 148.1 GB Linux Raid - No Mount Information but is says that it is used by /dev/md0
/dev/md0 148.1 DB F MD Raid (Reiser) mount -> /
Then I did finish and install.
It went into reboot and came up with the same message GRUB Loading stage 1.5.
Can you see what I did wrong?
Frank
Black, Alain wrote:
Frank,
I did this during the initial install. I had two SATA disks that I wished to stripe, so during the install, when it was talking about partitioning, I selected LINUX RAID for the partition type and then selected what it was being striped with from the 2nd disk.
I do not know if there is a way to stripe/mirror after the machine has already been installed.
-Alain.
-----Original Message----- From: Frank L. Parks [mailto:fparks@ezbizpartner.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 1:40 PM To: SuSE AMD64 Subject: Re: [suse-amd64] Problems Installing 9.3 on DFI K8M800 - Please Help
Alain,
How did you do this? Did you do it in the first part of the install or as a passed parameter? I don't have an IDE installed.
Thanks for the extremely quick reply! :-)
Frank
Black, Alain wrote:
Frank,
What driver are you using? The onboard RAID is not real hardware RAID and requires drivers to make it work.
I went the route of configuring software RAID instead of using my onboard VIA and have been quite happy with it.
-Alain.
-----Original Message----- From: Frank L. Parks [mailto:fparks@ezbizpartner.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 1:20 PM To: SuSE AMD64 Subject: [suse-amd64] Problems Installing 9.3 on DFI K8M800 - Please Help
Good Afternoon:
I am attempting to install SuSE 9.3 on a DFI Motherboard K800M800-MLVF utilizing the onboard VT8237 serial controller in RAID 1.
I have updated the mobo bios to the latest available.
I have entered the VIA bios and configured it as RAID 1 with the two Seagate 160MB SATA Drives.
I then do the install of SuSE 9.3. It gets through the first portion
of
the install with no problems. On reboot before the second portion, the
system hangs with GRUB Loading stage1.5.
The motherboard is a DFI K8M800-MLVF with 512MB RAM and an AMD64 3000+.
What other information can I provide so that I can get the thing up? Just booting from the CD seems fine. I can even boot into rescue mode.
I sure that I'm missing something simple, but unfortunately I don't
have
a clue.
Thanks in advance,
Frank