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#1 2009-04-25 02:19:24

heleos
Member
From: Maine, USA
Registered: 2007-04-24
Posts: 678

[SOLVED] FakeRAID 1 setup

EDIT: Ignore these first 2 posts by me, I was confused and stupid

I recently bought a new computer, and with it a couple 640gb harddrives to set up in raid1. I enabled and set it up in BIOS, formatted it for NTFS, and its viewing correctly in windows. Now I'm trying to get it to work in my arch install. The only information I can find is for linux software raids. How do I recognize my hardware raid?

INFO:

My motherboard is an ASUS Rampage II Extreme, using the intel hardware raid chipset.

running dmraid -s returned the following:

*** Group superset isw_bjijfjhagc
--> Subset
name   : isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID1
size   : 1250259200
stride : 128
type   : mirror
status : ok
subsets: 0
devs   : 2
spares : 0

Unfortunately.... I'm not quite sure what to do after this. I tried 'dmraid -a yes', but that doesn't seem to do anything.... I'm at a loss. Can anyone help me out?

EDIT:
I was able to make some progress. I built my raid on linux using mdadm, and I am able to mount it after boot by manually using the mount command, however it does not work in /etc/fstab. I get this error during bootup, and while trying to use UUID in fstab:

Failed to read last sector (1250252799): Invalid argument
HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet,
   or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...),
   or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,
   or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS),
   or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid).
Failed to mount '/dev/md0': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/md0' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

Having this

UUID=E6609EE3609EB9AF /storage ntfs-3g defaults 0 2

or this

/dev/md0 /storage ntfs-3g defaults 0 2

in my fstab does not work correctly, but after I log into my shell, I can do `mount /dev/md0 /storage` and it seems to mount correctly.... Although it looks like not even root has permission to do anything to the files there

Last edited by heleos (2009-04-26 17:01:31)

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#2 2009-04-25 16:45:49

heleos
Member
From: Maine, USA
Registered: 2007-04-24
Posts: 678

Re: [SOLVED] FakeRAID 1 setup

Well.... Sort of an update.

I used mdadm to remove my array, and made a new one (using /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1) and now my drive mounts properly through fstab! I am able to cd into it and create/open files. There seems to be a little problem. When I startx using gnome, nautilus seems to go into an infinite loop of starting itself, to the point where I have to do a hard reset. The mouse will not move, ctrl-alt-backspace does not kill X, etc. When I try starting X into fvwm, mouse and keyboard do not work, which leads me to believe it's doing the same sort of loop, but not with nautilus.

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#3 2009-04-25 17:26:50

graysky
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From: :wq
Registered: 2008-12-01
Posts: 10,595
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Re: [SOLVED] FakeRAID 1 setup

heleos wrote:

When I startx using gnome, nautilus seems to go into an infinite loop of starting itself, to the point where I have to do a hard reset. The mouse will not move, ctrl-alt-backspace does not kill X, etc. When I try starting X into fvwm, mouse and keyboard do not work, which leads me to believe it's doing the same sort of loop, but not with nautilus.

No idea about your RAID problems, but you need to add support for c+a+bs in gnome by using the don't zap modification to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf[/url].

Last edited by graysky (2009-04-25 17:27:04)


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#4 2009-04-25 18:34:35

.:B:.
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Registered: 2006-11-26
Posts: 5,819
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Re: [SOLVED] FakeRAID 1 setup

Mdadm will do full Linux software RAID - no Windows compatibility though. Dmraid is meant to handle the FakeRAID chips that are so popular (mostly in Windows tongue) nowadays. Dmraid, if it can handle your specific chip, will be able to handle the FakeRAID RAID setups (sometimes only certain types of RAID depending on how complete the support for your chipset is). FakeRAID isn't software RAID (it has a 'dedicated' chip) but not hardware RAID either (it still requires the CPU to do the dirty work actually...). However, if you need that RAID partition to be shared between Windows and Linux, FakeRAID is often the only solution.


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#5 2009-04-25 19:41:35

heleos
Member
From: Maine, USA
Registered: 2007-04-24
Posts: 678

Re: [SOLVED] FakeRAID 1 setup

That's what I was getting confused about. I figured fakeraid was just another word for software raid tongue I'm going to update my topic to be more specific.

So I've moved away from mdadm, and now trying dmraid. I'm not on linux atm, but when I get back to it I will post my command outputs.

EDIT:
Ok, back in linux.

dmraid -tay shows the following:

[root@archy ~]# dmraid -tay
isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID1: 0 1250259208 mirror core 2 131072 nosync 2 /dev/sdc 0 /dev/sdb 0
isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID11: 0 1250252800 linear /dev/mapper/isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID1 2048
[root@archy ~]# ls -l /dev/mapper
total 0
crw-rw---- 1 root root  10, 60 2009-04-25 16:43 control
brw------- 1 root disk 254,  0 2009-04-25 16:43 isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID1
brw------- 1 root disk 254,  1 2009-04-25 16:43 isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID11

I'm guessing that the "xxxRAID1" is the actualy raid I want to use, but I'm not exactly sure how to mount it..

[root@archy ~]# mount /dev/mapper/isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID1 /storage
mount: /dev/mapper/isw_bjijfjhagc_WDg40RAID1 already mounted or /storage busy

Also, nautilus is showing me 2 hard drives called "RAID", so it's not just showing me 1 mirrored raid

Last edited by heleos (2009-04-25 20:57:27)

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#6 2009-04-26 17:01:22

heleos
Member
From: Maine, USA
Registered: 2007-04-24
Posts: 678

Re: [SOLVED] FakeRAID 1 setup

Well... I don't know if I just needed a good nights sleep or what.... But it seems to be working! Decided that instead of trying to mount /dev/mapper/xxx, I should look at the UUID, and sure enough, I did `ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid`, found my drive, added it to fstab, and... SUCCESS!

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