Asus A7N8X and RAID 1 on Fedora Core 1?

[BrianP]

Hi,

I have an Asus A7N8X Deluxe and I have 2 Raptor 74 SATA drives connected
to the motherboard. I hit Control-S at boot time and setup a RAID 1
using both drives. 72 GB is much more than enough for a web/database
server and redudnancy is what I want.

When I boot from the Redhat Fedora disk 1 and use Disk Druid to manually
partition the RAID, it doesn't see a hardware RAID, but rather 2
separate hard drives, /dev/hde and /dev/hdg. I thought the motherboard
was supposed to gang both drives together and present the pair to the
operating system as a single drive.

When I try to make a software RAID, it uses all 72 GB as the root
partition and doesn't give the ability to use only part of it. It then
complains that there is no swap partition.

Is there much difference between a software and a hardware RAID with
SATA drives on a Nvidia Nforce chip set and a 2400+ AMD CPU? I would
rather have the RAID handled in hardware on the motherboard and leave
the CPU out of it. I did exactly the same thing with 2 other Raports on
windoze using the same mother board and it saw only one drive.

Has anybody successfully setup a hardware RAID1 on this motherboard in
Fedora Linux?

Thank you,

Brian

 

[Ben Pope]

Hi,

I have an Asus A7N8X Deluxe and I have 2 Raptor 74 SATA drives connected
to the motherboard. I hit Control-S at boot time and setup a RAID 1
using both drives. 72 GB is much more than enough for a web/database
server and redudnancy is what I want.

When I boot from the Redhat Fedora disk 1 and use Disk Druid to manually
partition the RAID, it doesn't see a hardware RAID, but rather 2
separate hard drives, /dev/hde and /dev/hdg. I thought the motherboard
was supposed to gang both drives together and present the pair to the
operating system as a single drive.

You should know Linux better than that - it shows you everything! The
devices should be visible. They are also probably visible as separate
drives to Windows.

It's the partition that spans the drives, hence it should be seen as a
partition, either on the first drive, or a separate "raid" device. e.g.,
/dev/hde1 or /dev/rd/... /dev/md1 etc.

When I try to make a software RAID, it uses all 72 GB as the root
partition and doesn't give the ability to use only part of it. It then
complains that there is no swap partition.

Dunno, never tried it.

I'm not sure you can do what you're trying to do. RAID has a partition that
spans multiple drives. Surely you get the option

Is there much difference between a software and a hardware RAID with
SATA drives on a Nvidia Nforce chip set and a 2400+ AMD CPU? I would
rather have the RAID handled in hardware on the motherboard and leave
the CPU out of it. I did exactly the same thing with 2 other Raports on
windoze using the same mother board and it saw only one drive.

Has anybody successfully setup a hardware RAID1 on this motherboard in
Fedora Linux?

Nope.

I'm not entirely sure if your RAID config would be md or ataraid, I think
it's the latter, so /dev/ataraid/ might be insightful.

Ben