Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Keith Ballantyne wrote: For the 31r1a to recognize your network, if it went as in my case, the installer shouldhave proposed you with a list of network modules. You have to choose something call nforether,I believe. Thanks. the 31r1a installer works with the nForce2 network card 10/100 driver on my asus a8n-e. So, I've installed about 6 different ways, utltimately arriving at some critical error somewhere along the way. I've read most of the faq/helps/howtos and archives that I could find, and I still have the same problem. I want to use RAID0 for the bulk of my file system. I would like to even use RAID0 for my boot and swap partitions. I suspect using raid0 for /boot is a non-starter: afaik GRUB can only load things from a single device. Using raid1 for /boot and raid0 for everything else would simplify things, I hope. Having said that, I've not actually used raid for booting off myself, I've just had to debug GRUB-not-booting-again problems several times :| I followed the instructions outlined at http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_software_raid?from=10comments_per_page=10 and got further than ever before, but couldn't successfully install either GRUB or LILO. The article above suggests 4 raid partitions /boot (50M) /swap (1G) / (10G) /var (the rest) It is also written specifically for RAID1, though it implies that doing the same for RAID0 would work. I'm worried because I'm unsure if the MBR is 'striped' in RAID 0, or if the MBR's of each of my 4 drives are exempt. Regardless, I've tried it three ways: If you're using md within partitions the MBRs are exempt, because they're outside all partitions. But when booting, grub will load most of itself from the /boot filesystem, wherever that is. It will embed part of itself in some empty space at the head of the filesystem (as I understand it) and the remainder will be loaded by navigating the filesystem itself. The code to load the embedded bit is very simplistic, and doesn't appreciate the difference between sda1 and md0. case 1: /boot as a specific 50M partition, on the 1st SATA drive (ext3) case 2: /boot as a RAID1 collection of the first 50M worth of all 4 SATA drives (ext3). case 3: /boot as a RAID0 collection of the first 50M worth of all 4 SATA drives (ext3). note: In all 3 cases, the remainder of the drive was configured as a RAID0 array, and I used LVM (1 volume group) to created two logical volumes, a 4G swap volume and the rest (to mount as /). case 1: allowed me to complete installation, grub appeared to install okay, but it doesn't boot, I just get a blank screen. Very odd-- so you never get any of the stage1 loading... messages or anything? This really should have worked. Or did the screen go blank as it was booting and then not unblank? (Just as a matter of interest-- does installing without raid work at all? How about using the installer as a rescue disk, does that work?) case 2: the partitioner seemed to change the partition types, and would never let me install GRUB. Ick. Presumably the partition types got changed to the raid autorun type to be used by the kernel's own md bootstrapping code. If you have sda1 and sda2 as md0 (raid1) then you should be able to install grub to sda1 directly. However, persuading it to do this from inside Linux is convoluted-- you have to rewrite the device.map to specify that (hd0) is sda, which is presumably the reason for the installer not doing this for you. An alternative approach is to make a grub floppy[1], boot that, and then setup grub from there-- just do root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0). You need to have grub installed as in the files need to be in /boot/grub/ for the setup command to work. Presumably you won't have a useful menu.lst file, so you'll have boot the system by hand at least the first time-- after root (hd0,0) you need to do initrd /initrd.img-whatever and kernel /vmlinuz-whatever root=/dev/md0 and then boot. Not sure what parameters you may need to give to the kernel to get md0 automatically assembled-- md=autorun? Istr it days gone by there was a build a boot floppy option. Has that gone now? [1] which you can do with just dd from the shell while installing. A grub boot floppy is a terribly useful thing to keep around btw. From memory: dd if=/boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 and then dd if=/boot/grub/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1. SRH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Steven Haslam wrote: If you have sda1 and sda2 as md0 (raid1) then you should be able to install grub to sda1 directly. However, persuading it to do this from inside Linux is convoluted-- you have to rewrite the device.map to specify that (hd0) is sda, which is presumably the reason for the installer not doing this for you. actually, having looked at the howto link you psoted (naughty me should have read it beforehand) you should be able to do this from the installer shell: bash# chroot /target bash# grub --device-map=/dev/null grub device (hd0) /dev/sda grub root (hd0,0) grub setup (hd0) SRH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:52:44PM -0500, Keith Ballantyne wrote: I recently bought an Asus A8N-E mobo and AMD64 3800+ CPU. I then bought RAM, a case, and an ATI 300-based PCI Express 16 video card. I used netinstall sarge and managed to install 32-bit using the 2.6 kernel (as the 2.4 kernel wouldn't recognize my network card). ...a few days passed, and I realized that I wanted the 64-bit core. I recompiled the kernel, and then realized there was a 64-bit distribution, so I downloaded both the testing release (Etch) and the 31r1a netinstalls. 31r1a didn't recognize my onboard network, but Etch did. ...a few more days passed and I decided to buy 4 SATA II drives in an attempt to run RAID 0+1. I configured the BIOS and ran the installer, but the installer sees hda through hdd rather than a single RAID drive. In subsequent research (including this list archive) it appears that the BIOS RAID is considered 'inferior' to the software RAID support in Linux. So, my questions are: Unless you have hardware raid, just pretend the system has no raid at all (since really, it doesn't). 1) Why is the ASUS BIOS RAID inferior to software RAID on Linux? Because linux has better software raid than the bios. And it is not tied to specific hardware/bios versions, but can be moved between systems quite easily. It also is more cpu efficient, and gives you better ability to monitor the state of the raid. I suspect if windows had native software raid support, these fakeraid designs wouldn't even exist. 2) Is it possible to install 31r1a instead of the Etch release (I'm not overly keen on working with Etch, but will do it if it's a better 64-bit option...In the few days I played with 64-bit Etch it seemed to work well, but I didn't have most of the utilties I need available from the installer/package manager). I am surprised if the amd64 3.1 doesn't see the network byt i386 3.1 does. They should support the same hardware. There are some detection issues with nvidia ethernet in amd64 3.1, but usually doing 'modprobe forcedeth' on console 2 and going back to the installer fixes that. For some reason the network chip isn't in the pci device listing with 2.6.8 kernel on some nvidiabvoards. The driver loads fine though, when you ask for it manually. 3) Do I need to flash the BIOS for things to work? It sometimes helps. I don't see any problems here that look bios related though. 4) Is ATI 300 support better in Etch? Generally ATI is not what I would recommend in terms of good linux support. You will almost certainly need to use the packages for ati fglrx (a google search will find the unofficial debian packages for it along with instructions). Those may require the use of etch. Not sure. Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 01:10:10PM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: The OP said any driver, and I pointed out that isn't true. Trying to have users tell the difference between software raid drivers and hardware raid drivers is, I think, harder than just having them tell software vs. hardware raid controllers apart. After all, the latter can be done with a high confidence by looking at the price tag. Linux software raid has a lot of advantages like being able to configure on a per-partition, not per-disk, basis. Many true hardware raids can't even do that. I think most of them can do volumes on a raid, which is essentially partitions. They show up as seperate drives then. Of course you can also partition the raid device since it is just a disk to the OS. However, I haven't actually seen benchmarks showing its faster. I'm not sure how you'd benchmark it, either... You'd have a lot of windows-vs-linux differences to filter out somehow. I was told by a 3ware dealer that many of their users run linux software raid on their 12 port cards, because they find with a modern cpu linux software raid beats the 3ware hardware raid chip. So they use it as a single card 12 driver sata controller instead. I certainly know in the past I got a drop in performance when going from software raid1 to an ibm serveraid 4m doing raid1. I was surprised and rather disappointed in that. The hardware raid was easier to manage though. Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 05:34:54PM -0500, Keith Ballantyne wrote: For the 31r1a to recognize your network, if it went as in my case, the installer shouldhave proposed you with a list of network modules. You have to choose something call nforether,I believe. Thanks. the 31r1a installer works with the nForce2 network card 10/100 driver on my asus a8n-e. So, I've installed about 6 different ways, utltimately arriving at some critical error somewhere along the way. I've read most of the faq/helps/howtos and archives that I could find, and I still have the same problem. I want to use RAID0 for the bulk of my file system. I would like to even use RAID0 for my boot and swap partitions. I followed the instructions outlined at http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_software_raid?from=10comments_per_page=10 and got further than ever before, but couldn't successfully install either GRUB or LILO. The article above suggests 4 raid partitions /boot (50M) /swap (1G) / (10G) /var (the rest) It is also written specifically for RAID1, though it implies that doing the same for RAID0 would work. I'm worried because I'm unsure if the MBR is 'striped' in RAID 0, or if the MBR's of each of my 4 drives are exempt. Regardless, I've tried it three ways: case 1: /boot as a specific 50M partition, on the 1st SATA drive (ext3) Makes sense. case 2: /boot as a RAID1 collection of the first 50M worth of all 4 SATA drives (ext3). Raid 1 only does two drives. At least in normal setups. You can stripe mirrors or mirror stripes of course to make bigger setups. case 3: /boot as a RAID0 collection of the first 50M worth of all 4 SATA drives (ext3). note: In all 3 cases, the remainder of the drive was configured as a RAID0 array, and I used LVM (1 volume group) to created two logical volumes, a 4G swap volume and the rest (to mount as /). case 1: allowed me to complete installation, grub appeared to install okay, but it doesn't boot, I just get a blank screen. case 2: the partitioner seemed to change the partition types, and would never let me install GRUB. Grub works fine if you do raid1 on two partitions. Trying 4 won't work. Too complex for the boot loader. case 3: would never allow GRUB (or LILO) to install on the RAID0 array. It kept indicating that status couldn't be reread from /dev/md/0. When I rebooted, I would reconstruct the partitions as outlined in case 3 above, and the same error would occur. The boot loaders don't know raid0 as far as I know. So, right now I have everything installed except an operational bootloader. Make /boot a raid1 using a 50M partition on the first two drives. Install grub to the MBR of both those drives. Or just make it a plain partition. If you use raid0 at all, reliability is obviously not an issue for the system overall, and performance for /boot is not an issue either so a plain single partition on the first drive is fine. Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Lennart Sorensen wrote: I think most of them can do volumes on a raid, which is essentially partitions. They show up as seperate drives then. Of course you can also partition the raid device since it is just a disk to the OS. No. That's different from what Linux software raid can do. Linux software raid can say, ok, use sda1, sdb1, sdc1, sdd1 as raid1; sda2, sdb2, sdc2 as RAID-5 with sdd2 as a hot spare; and finally, sda3, sdb3, sdc3, and sdd3 as raid0. Most hardware raid can't do that. I was told by a 3ware dealer that many of their users run linux software raid on their 12 port cards, because they find with a modern cpu linux software raid beats the 3ware hardware raid chip. So they use it as a single card 12 driver sata controller instead. Interesting. I have several 3ware 9000s in the field, never tried that... The hardware raid was easier to manage though. Definitely. Especially with libata's hot-swap deficiencies. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
I originally attempted to send this 29 Jan at 3:30PM, but it was rejected by my mail relay server, so I'm attempting to resend to provide a follow up on the thread. Does your installation work, are you able to boot it by other means? For example, try using a Grub-floppy, and see if that lets you boot. Thanks. It turns out I followed a similar path, but from a different source. Grub was hanging on install (I let it sit in a 50% complete state for about 8 hours to make sure...it was definately not doing what it was supposed to do). So I went to: http://xtronics.com/Reference/SATA-RAID-Debian.htm The instructions there (as everywhere else) don't necessarily say that RAID0 cannot be used for the boot partition, but I was guessing that was the problem. Since RAID0 is a stripe-set across multiple drives, I reasoned that it couldn't load a bootloader from them. To rectify this, I made my /boot mount be RAID1 rather than RAID0. When I did that, GRUB installed fine, but would not boot. So I followed the steps outlined in the web page above, notably the section where you start Grub (I did it from a floppy after invoking grub-floppy from an alternate console during one of my install attempts) and execute: root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) root (hd1,0) setup (hd1) ... In my case, I have 4 drives, so I continued through (hd3). After that grub successfully booted the system. So, now I'm on to making a chroot ia32 so I can get OpenOffice running. Ah, the joy :) - Keith -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
On 1/29/06, Keith Ballantyne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, right now I have everything installed except an operational bootloader. Does your installation work, are you able to boot it by other means? For example, try using a Grub-floppy, and see if that lets you boot. Also see this: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-86219.html Try to install Grub by doing the steps described there. Since you already managed to install your system on the RAID, skip the initial talk about installing to IDE, and then copying over. Just look at the Grub installation part. Edwin
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Alle 03:03, sabato 28 gennaio 2006, Anthony DeRobertis ha scritto: Helge Hafting wrote: The fact that you _need_ a raid driver in window is a strong hint that the raid is implemented in software - a hw raid controller can be made to look like a single disk on a standard controller - both linux and windows can then handle it without special drivers. Most all true hardware raid cards require drivers. At least under Linux, and I believe under Windows as well. The differences is between needing a special RAID driver (most of fake harware raids) and a simple SCSI one (like high-end ibm raid controllers: real hardware raid). There is this page telling the differences and more: http://linux.yyz.us/sata/faq-sata-raid.html And btw linux software raid outperforms most fake hardware raid (software ones), so you really no not need an hardware raid controller on linux, just a bunch on disks. -- ESC:wq -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Marco Amadori wrote: The differences is between needing a special RAID driver (most of fake harware raids) and a simple SCSI one (like high-end ibm raid controllers: real hardware raid). The OP said any driver, and I pointed out that isn't true. Trying to have users tell the difference between software raid drivers and hardware raid drivers is, I think, harder than just having them tell software vs. hardware raid controllers apart. After all, the latter can be done with a high confidence by looking at the price tag. And btw linux software raid outperforms most fake hardware raid (software ones), so you really no not need an hardware raid controller on linux, just a bunch on disks. Linux software raid has a lot of advantages like being able to configure on a per-partition, not per-disk, basis. Many true hardware raids can't even do that. However, I haven't actually seen benchmarks showing its faster. I'm not sure how you'd benchmark it, either... You'd have a lot of windows-vs-linux differences to filter out somehow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
For the 31r1a to recognize your network, if it went as in my case, the installer shouldhave proposed you with a list of network modules. You have to choose something call nforether,I believe. Thanks. the 31r1a installer works with the nForce2 network card 10/100 driver on my asus a8n-e. So, I've installed about 6 different ways, utltimately arriving at some critical error somewhere along the way. I've read most of the faq/helps/howtos and archives that I could find, and I still have the same problem. I want to use RAID0 for the bulk of my file system. I would like to even use RAID0 for my boot and swap partitions. I followed the instructions outlined at http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_software_raid?from=10comments_per_page=10 and got further than ever before, but couldn't successfully install either GRUB or LILO. The article above suggests 4 raid partitions /boot (50M) /swap (1G) / (10G) /var (the rest) It is also written specifically for RAID1, though it implies that doing the same for RAID0 would work. I'm worried because I'm unsure if the MBR is 'striped' in RAID 0, or if the MBR's of each of my 4 drives are exempt. Regardless, I've tried it three ways: case 1: /boot as a specific 50M partition, on the 1st SATA drive (ext3) case 2: /boot as a RAID1 collection of the first 50M worth of all 4 SATA drives (ext3). case 3: /boot as a RAID0 collection of the first 50M worth of all 4 SATA drives (ext3). note: In all 3 cases, the remainder of the drive was configured as a RAID0 array, and I used LVM (1 volume group) to created two logical volumes, a 4G swap volume and the rest (to mount as /). case 1: allowed me to complete installation, grub appeared to install okay, but it doesn't boot, I just get a blank screen. case 2: the partitioner seemed to change the partition types, and would never let me install GRUB. case 3: would never allow GRUB (or LILO) to install on the RAID0 array. It kept indicating that status couldn't be reread from /dev/md/0. When I rebooted, I would reconstruct the partitions as outlined in case 3 above, and the same error would occur. So, right now I have everything installed except an operational bootloader. Any thoughts? Thanks, Keith -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Keith Ballantyne wrote: Hi, I recently bought an Asus A8N-E mobo and AMD64 3800+ CPU. I then bought RAM, a case, and an ATI 300-based PCI Express 16 video card. I used netinstall sarge and managed to install 32-bit using the 2.6 kernel (as the 2.4 kernel wouldn't recognize my network card). ...a few days passed, and I realized that I wanted the 64-bit core. I recompiled the kernel, and then realized there was a 64-bit distribution, so I downloaded both the testing release (Etch) and the 31r1a netinstalls. 31r1a didn't recognize my onboard network, but Etch did. ...a few more days passed and I decided to buy 4 SATA II drives in an attempt to run RAID 0+1. I configured the BIOS and ran the installer, but the installer sees hda through hdd rather than a single RAID drive. In subsequent research (including this list archive) it appears that the BIOS RAID is considered 'inferior' to the software RAID support in Linux. So, my questions are: 1) Why is the ASUS BIOS RAID inferior to software RAID on Linux? Not necessarily inferior, but _unnecessary_. As others have pointed out, this is not a real raid controller. The bios does software raid, and the windows driver for the card does software raid for windows (if you use windows at all, that is.) The fact that you _need_ a raid driver in window is a strong hint that the raid is implemented in software - a hw raid controller can be made to look like a single disk on a standard controller - both linux and windows can then handle it without special drivers. So, in order to use a raid with this controller you need a software driver for it. And one exist - the linux software raid (md). It offers raid 0+1, among other things. You can get more space from your 4 disks with raid-5, but raid 0+1 will probably have better performance if you get the stripe size right. Note that bios raid and linux sw raid isn't compatible, so you have to turn bios raid off in order to use linux sw raid. There is no loss involved in doing this though. 2) Is it possible to install 31r1a instead of the Etch release (I'm not overly keen on working with Etch, but will do it if it's a better 64-bit option...In the few days I played with 64-bit Etch it seemed to work well, but I didn't have most of the utilties I need available from the installer/package manager). 3) Do I need to flash the BIOS for things to work? No - linux doesn't use the bios. The bios is only used to set up some hardware at power-on time, and to load the linux kernel which then takes over everything with its own drivers. Flashing the bios is sometimes useful if the old bios has bugs. Or if you want to do something radical like running linuxbios. 4) Is ATI 300 support better in Etch? I haven't tried, but I have the impression that unstable/experimental have more and better support for 3D. But of course there are more bugs to stumble over as well. You may want to try xserver-xorg 6.9.0.dfsg.1-4. (Also upgrade all the accompagnying libx... packages, xserver-common, libdrm and mesa packages. Write down the list of packages upgraded, so you can back out if you hit some showstopper bug. Helge Hafting -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Keith Ballantyne wrote: Hi, I recently bought an Asus A8N-E mobo and AMD64 3800+ CPU. I then bought RAM, a case, and an ATI 300-based PCI Express 16 video card. I used netinstall sarge and managed to install 32-bit using the 2.6 kernel (as the 2.4 kernel wouldn't recognize my network card). ...a few days passed, and I realized that I wanted the 64-bit core. I recompiled the kernel, and then realized there was a 64-bit distribution, so I downloaded both the testing release (Etch) and the 31r1a netinstalls. 31r1a didn't recognize my onboard network, but Etch did. For the 31r1a to recognize your network, if it went as in my case, the installer shouldhave proposed you with a list of network modules. You have to choose something call nforether,I believe. ...a few more days passed and I decided to buy 4 SATA II drives in an attempt to run RAID 0+1. I configured the BIOS and ran the installer, but the installer sees hda through hdd rather than a single RAID drive. In subsequent research (including this list archive) it appears that the BIOS RAID is considered 'inferior' to the software RAID support in Linux. So, my questions are: 1) Why is the ASUS BIOS RAID inferior to software RAID on Linux? 2) Is it possible to install 31r1a instead of the Etch release (I'm not overly keen on working with Etch, but will do it if it's a better 64-bit option...In the few days I played with 64-bit Etch it seemed to work well, but I didn't have most of the utilties I need available from the installer/package manager). 3) Do I need to flash the BIOS for things to work? 4) Is ATI 300 support better in Etch? Thanks, ihcfan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Helge Hafting wrote: The fact that you _need_ a raid driver in window is a strong hint that the raid is implemented in software - a hw raid controller can be made to look like a single disk on a standard controller - both linux and windows can then handle it without special drivers. Most all true hardware raid cards require drivers. At least under Linux, and I believe under Windows as well. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
On 1/27/06, Keith Ballantyne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I recently bought an Asus A8N-E mobo and AMD64 3800+ CPU. I then bought RAM, a case, and an ATI 300-based PCI Express 16 video card. I used netinstall sarge and managed to install 32-bit using the 2.6 kernel (as the 2.4 kernel wouldn't recognize my network card). Hi, I own an Asus A8N-E mobo too. ...a few days passed, and I realized that I wanted the 64-bit core. I recompiled the kernel, and then realized there was a 64-bit distribution, so I downloaded both the testing release (Etch) and the 31r1a netinstalls. 31r1a didn't recognize my onboard network, but Etch did. ...a few more days passed and I decided to buy 4 SATA II drives in an attempt to run RAID 0+1. I configured the BIOS and ran the installer, but the installer sees hda through hdd rather than a single RAID drive. In subsequent research (including this list archive) it appears that the BIOS RAID is considered 'inferior' to the software RAID support in Linux. So, my questions are: 1) Why is the ASUS BIOS RAID inferior to software RAID on Linux? AFAIK the RAID on this motherboard is not a real hardware RAID, it is done by software. So you unless you use a software to control it Linux is not going to see it. See these threads for details: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=57548 http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=661719#post661719 Quote from: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_Gentoo_with_NVRAID_using_dmraid The NVRAID BIOS is actually a software raid. The method used to install here will work with other operating systems such as Windows with no configuration changes needed with Windows. In linux 2.4 the Ataraid kernel framework provided support for software RAID assisted by the BIOS. For kernel 2.6 the device-mapper runtime can do the same kind of work, but it's configured in userspace however. Heinz Maulshagen introduced the dmraid tool to create RAID mappings using the kernel device-mapper subsystem. The controllers supported are (mostly cheap) Fake-RAID IDE / SATA controllers which have BIOS functions on it. Most common ones are: Promise Fasttrack controllers as well as HPT 37x, Intel and LSI. Also serial ata RAID controllers like Silicon Image Medley and Nvidia Nforce are supported by the program. I didn't use the RAID feature of A8N-E, as I have only one SATA drive. 2) Is it possible to install 31r1a instead of the Etch release (I'm not overly keen on working with Etch, but will do it if it's a better 64-bit option... I installed Etch, and then did a dist-upgrade to sid. I didn't have any problems with it so far. I didn't try running sarge, so I can't tell which one works better. In the few days I played with 64-bit Etch it seemed to work well, but I didn't have most of the utilties I need available from the installer/package manager). What utilities weren't available? 3) Do I need to flash the BIOS for things to work? I didn't flash the BIOS. And things are working for me, I mean: sound (with ALSA), network (with in-kernel forcedeth driver), sata, sensors, ... What do you think a BIOS flash would solve? 4) Is ATI 300 support better in Etch? I have a different video card, so I can't help you here. Thanks, ihcfan Kind regards edwin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
