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#1 2005-03-14 15:35:39

timm
Member
From: Wisconsin
Registered: 2004-02-25
Posts: 417

Old Raid Setup in New Computer - Chicken vs. Egg (long)

I have 2 Highpoint RocketRaid ATA raid cards in my machine, and a 27G drive attached to each.  These drives were set up as a Raid in my old machine before the motherboard died.  (I think they were a stripe set)  These drives held the OS when I ran them under RH, so there is a root directory, etc.

I don't think I need anything on these drives, as they were pretty well backed up.  But as an exercise, I would like to re-establish the raid.  (There's also a problem if I can't get it re-established - that's below)

If I plug everything in and boot arch off of my main drive, it begins to examine the drives, then outputs some information about how the UUID of hdk9 is different, but seems to be ok with that, the same with hdk8, but when it outputs the same message for hdk7 it simply stops.  There's no error message, the boot simply stops and the computer hangs.

If I unplug one or the other of the drives, boot goes on until it deals with the drive, then I get a kernel panic.  Both drives give the same result here.  I should have written it down, but I think the error has to do with the inability to mount the root filesystem (the old one of which is on these drives)

If I boot with Knoppix via CD, it doesn't recognize the drives in /dev, but under /proc and /proc/ide they show up as ide4 and ide5. (at least I think that's them)

Of course, if I boot with the Raid drives themselves, they are not working so they get me to GRUB and stop.  So I can't seem to boot from them, or from my regular drive if they are in the system.

1.  Is there a way to reconstruct this Raid after bootup; can I prevent Arch from trying to do this during the boot?

2.  Is there a way to get Knoppix to recognize the drives so I can reconstruct there?

3.  If I can't establish the raid, how can I reformat the drives so they can be used again?  Just having them in the system alone gives me a kernel panic, and together hangs the system.

Yes I'm a newbie, but I always dive into the deep end  wink

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#2 2005-03-14 15:42:41

puntmuts
Member
Registered: 2005-02-22
Posts: 138

Re: Old Raid Setup in New Computer - Chicken vs. Egg (long)

IIRC the RAID setup was done in the BIOS of this RAID controller and uses the ATARAID driver in kernel 2.4. Maybe you could try to install or compile a 2.4 kernel with this ATARAID support for your Highpoint cards.


Out / Gone
Mirgrating all my machines off ArchLinux . No longer part of the ArchLinux community / users .
Done. Goodbye.

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#3 2005-03-14 18:37:10

MNKyDeth
Member
From: MI
Registered: 2003-09-13
Posts: 89

Re: Old Raid Setup in New Computer - Chicken vs. Egg (long)

Well, this card should be supported even in the 2.6 kernels. It just won't have the ataraid option like the 2.4 kernels had. You'll need to do a software raid on them. Set each drive to there own raid setup. Don't have them combined.

When you boot up from your main drive fdisk the drives and set them to type fd (auto-raid detect). Then make sure you have all the raid stuff compiled into the kernel as * as M won't cut it here. Once you have the drives and the kernel done up, reboot so the kernel will detect the drives as a raid, then mkreiserfs /dev/md/0 or whatever filesystem you want your raid to be. After it is formatted add it to your /etc/fstab and have fun smile

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#4 2005-03-14 21:58:12

puntmuts
Member
Registered: 2005-02-22
Posts: 138

Re: Old Raid Setup in New Computer - Chicken vs. Egg (long)

What is supported on this card is only the IDE functions, not the RAID functions in kernel 2.6 . So if you created a RAID set in 2.4 using the cards BIOS the only way to access it without reformatting and repartitioning the thing is booting into a 2.4 kernel with ataraid support for these cards.

At the best you can say that this card is partially supported in 2.6, the lacking of the (hardware/driver) RAID features makes it not more then a normal IDE controller.


Out / Gone
Mirgrating all my machines off ArchLinux . No longer part of the ArchLinux community / users .
Done. Goodbye.

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#5 2005-03-18 16:05:17

timm
Member
From: Wisconsin
Registered: 2004-02-25
Posts: 417

Re: Old Raid Setup in New Computer - Chicken vs. Egg (long)

I downloaded the source and built my 2.4 kernel per the directions I pulled off of the LinuxGazette page - but when I rebooted, GRUB was gone and LILO was in it's place.  I'm not sure what happened there.  Nothing in the instructions seems LILO specific.

So I went and configured LILO to boot the new kernel, but when I ran LILO to install it I got a bunch of ext2 filesystem error messages; I tried again and it seemed to work.

I rebooted, went to the 2.4 kernel in LILO, it started booting and then complained about corruptiion on a partition, fix it manually, etc.  OK, I'm nowhere near there yet.

I rebooted, and thankfully my 2.6 kernel is still there, works fine, boots fine.

What did I screw up on while building the kernel?  How did I get LILO?

I'm using udev with my 2.6 kernel, does this have something to do with the filesystem error in 2.4?  (where I didn't use it)

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#6 2005-03-27 19:11:34

timm
Member
From: Wisconsin
Registered: 2004-02-25
Posts: 417

Re: Old Raid Setup in New Computer - Chicken vs. Egg (long)

Well, I still haven't figured out what happened with my kernel, but the 2.4 kernel brings up the raid just fine.  I'll move the data I found ( I did find some stuff) onto another drive and then go back to 2.6.

Thanks for helping me with this.

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