Richard, (I'm top posting intentionally). I'm confused, you said previously you were never going to run windows on the box, so why are you researching the windows / linux compatibility dm-raid driver?
ie. md-raid - native linux software raid. Does not support fake-raid bios, but talks directly to the drives. Raid setup is maintained in a linux generic way. Lots of users so it is easy to get answers and Howto info. dm-raid - linux fake-raid driver. Reads raid config info from the controller bios. Because every fake-raid controller has a seperate api, it has specialized api modules for each controller type. Since it is in no way generic, it has lots more code and is much less well tested than md-raid. Also, you will find it harder to ask questions and get reliable answers. To the best of my knowledge, md-raid is highly preferred unless you need to be able to dual boot your machine. In the case of a dual boot, windows uses the controller bios to setup the raid, so you need dm-raid to ensure linux sees the same raid array the windows does. I believe md-raid is supported directly during opensuse 10.2 install, so if you go that way you don't have any research / work to do. Just use it. HTH Greg On 6/21/07, Richard Creighton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Thanks all. It turns out I *do* have the so-called 'fake-RAID' as was suggested earlier. I've made some progress....but.... Greg Freemyer wrote: > On 6/20/07, Richard Creighton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> At the risk of appearing stupid, which I am willing to do, I recently >> purchased a ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard with intergral RAID5 hardware >> controller. I also purchased 4 WD 400G SATA drives to make a 1.09T >> (usable space) raid5 array under Linux, SUSE 10.2. >> <snip> > > I don't know about your MB, but most onboard raid is fake-raid. > > http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html > <snip> This was very helpful > <snip> > If you need dual boot to the raid, the you can look at the dmraid > module and see if your controller is supported. > > Greg <snip> ...tracking down the latest incarnation of *dmraid* from the author's website, I found a version that supported the NForce/Nvidia chipset. Installing it on a 5th drive (my 'Plan B') below: > Failing that, if I install a 5th drive, an IDE device for the purpose of > booting the system, is there a driver/module that I could load after > booting that would allow me to use the hardware raid5 drives rather than > depend on the software raid? I get the following results: ASUS:/home/rich # dmraid -r /dev/sda: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors, data@ 0 /dev/sdb: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors, data@ 0 /dev/sdc: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors, data@ 0 /dev/sdd: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors, data@ 0 ASUS:/home/rich # dmraid -ay -i ERROR: device-mapper target type "raid45" not in kernel I am using 10.2 with the latest kernel available via normal updates that I am aware of without going to alpha versions. Even though this system is a dual-core AMD, I chose to install a 32bit OS initially to get things set up before tackling the somewhat sparse 64 bit world that I see has even more challanges ahead :( OS: Linux 2.6.18.8-0.3-bigsmp i686 System: openSUSE 10.2 (i586) KDE: 3.5.5 "release 45.4" My question now appears to be, what do I have to do to get the 'raid45' target type error resolved? I don't want to use a 'lower' raid level than raid 5 because with 1Tb of space, I want very badly to have the redundancy offered by that mode without an unnecessary redundancy of hardware backup required by 'lower' raid levels. As the fake-raid supports level 5, I'd like to use it if possible. My next goal would be to be able to install and boot using the raid5/dmraid techniques suggested in the above URL, but for now, I'd be content with solving the 'raid45' error. Thanks in advance. Richard
-- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
