Thomas A. Anderson wrote: > If hardware raid (like if I bought a controller), would it be any > different, if I removed the drives and just put on one another machine > -- would I be able to see the data on it like a normal drive? Or would I > run into the same issue??
if you choose using hardware raid over software raid, then the management of the RAID depends on the controller. This means you have to use the management tools provided by the manufacturer and in order to use this disk on another computer, you have to make sure that the other computer has also the same controller (I mean exactly the same). Also mdadm provides monitoring and email notification, which in case of hardware raid can also be done, but is more exotic or would require something like SNMP. It might be common in some vendor specific server hardware, but I usually avoid it on no brand PC. IMO there is more disadvantage than advantage in using hardware raid. Regarding you issue with recovering the raid, it could be you have to put manually some entry in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf. It is just a guess, but I have seen this when older metadata format or no metadata in older RAID version is used. Have look at "man mdadm.conf" The 83 for the partition used means it is marked as linux partition. The fd was used before to help the system know that this is linux raid partition, so that mdadm can take over and it is OK to use it today even if mdadm evolved and can handle the partition even if it is not marked as fd. I would assume it was older RAID version when this was created - there is no meta or old meta format. This is why I would try manually writing the mdadm.conf for this partition. You can use blkid /dev/sdb1 and use the UUID to create the entry for example: blkid /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: UUID="5c88d19b-4345-d8c6-e214-edc45ed40d02" TYPE="linux_raid_member" PARTUUID="86e010a2-01" and the record in mdadm.conf is ARRAY /dev/md0 metadata=0.90 UUID=5c88d19b:4345d8c6:e214edc4:5ed40d02 the metadata version 0.90 is AFAIR the old format or no metadata at all. Check the manual
