[SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

ssl6 · 2009-11-15 20:03:46

i've been trying to search for info on this. but what I can find, just isn't giving me the whole picture, so i'm not grasping it i guess.

but I'm trying to install arch on an athlon-xp system, with a silicon 3112 sata/raid controller on board. i setup a raid0 in the raid bios, but when i boot the arch linux CD, it doesn't recognize the raid as one disk, it shows me 2 seperate devices. but if i boot the gparted livecd i have, it shows me a sil_xxxxxx under /dev/mapper. so it sees the raid, on top of the 2 seperate disks.

wondering how i can get arch to recognize it properly? or should i just partition is with gparted, and then start from there in the arch setup?

Last edited by ssl6 (2009-11-16 00:59:06)

.:B:. · 2009-11-15 20:51:03

I think you are confused. What you are staring at is a so-called FakeRAID setup, while when you mention RAID in here, we think Linux software RAID or a dedicated hardware RAID. FakeRAID is neither. If the box has no other OS, ditch that crap (the FakeRAID) and never look back. The thing is I'm not sure GRUB supports installing on RAID 0 (it does on RAID 1, that's how my server runs here).

If you want to keep the FakeRAID, look into setting up dmraid. It's been covered extensively on both the forum and the wiki, and google has a fair bit on it too. I hope you don't mind my clarifying your topic title.

ssl6 · 2009-11-15 21:49:18

so even though it has a secondary raid bios? its still not a real raid? dam, i'm using a pair of 2.5" 5400rpm drives, the extra speed would have been nice. winXP was working fine on the raid0 last night.

fair enough i guess, i can afford to toss it. i'll just dual boot XP on the second drive, i'm going to need it again soon enough

Last edited by ssl6 (2009-11-15 21:50:57)

Mr.Elendig · 2009-11-15 22:06:40

Personally, I would disable the raid in the bios, and use software raid instead. Works nicely. (I've done the same on a card with the same controller)

Depending on what raid level you want, you might want to take a look at a plain lvm2 setup.

Last edited by Mr.Elendig (2009-11-15 22:08:23)

.:B:. · 2009-11-15 22:29:08

ssl6 wrote:

so even though it has a secondary raid bios? its still not a real raid? dam, i'm using a pair of 2.5" 5400rpm drives, the extra speed would have been nice. winXP was working fine on the raid0 last night.
fair enough i guess, i can afford to toss it. i'll just dual boot XP on the second drive, i'm going to need it again soon enough

As I said (but maybe it wasn't completely clear) you can use the dmraid package and try to get it to work in Linux. It is a crappy way of having RAID though - there is nothing done in hardware, the CPU still does the hard work like with regular software RAID.

mikesd · 2009-11-15 22:40:00

As others have mentioned software raid is the way to go unless you have other OSs on the disk. I used to run software raid on my server when it ran Linux. In a way I still use software raid but now I use Open Solaris and ZFS. As another poster mentioned, lvm is worth looking at in addition to software raid.

ssl6 · 2009-11-16 00:58:46

I use LVM on my file server. Its just that when I set this system up last night with XP to do what I needed to the video recording with my geforce FX vivo card that i needed to do for someone, I had set up the raid0 in the raid bios thinking the added speed might help for recording at high bitrate in real time, and proceeded to install loading the drivers from a floppy, thinking it was hardware raid, and then earlier I wiped XP because I was done doing what I needed to do, and wanted to use the machine to compile some stuff. Then I found the arch setup wasn't recognizing the raid. I ended up just killing the raid and installed to one drive. I don't really need it, and it turns out my video recording job isn't done yet, there's more coming, so I'm just going to dual boot XP on the second drive, hopefully it won't suffer recording the next portion of video next weekend when I get the other disc.

its nothing mission critical really, I just thought it was a raid controller, and it turns out it not. thanks for the help guys

Arch Linux

#1 2009-11-15 20:03:46

[SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

#2 2009-11-15 20:51:03

Re: [SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

#3 2009-11-15 21:49:18

Re: [SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

#4 2009-11-15 22:06:40

Re: [SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

#5 2009-11-15 22:29:08

Re: [SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

#6 2009-11-15 22:40:00

Re: [SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

#7 2009-11-16 00:58:46

Re: [SOLVED-ish] FakeRAID RAID 0 install *

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