Fedora FC5 not seeing RAID controller

[mishspring]

Greetings,

I have a new E-9415R 1U rack server with on-board Intel RAID-1 controller. I have two SATA drives.

In the embedded RAID Controller's BIOS, it says I have RAID-1 with 1 logical drive and 2 stripes.

I have downloaded some RAID drivers from Intel's web site, from a URL provided by Gateway support: http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=1650&lang=eng

On the above URL, since "RedHat Fedora" is not one of the options, I simply chose "RedHat Linux".

I downloaded SATA RAID drivers that were marked as follows:

This download contains the Serial ATA RAID Driver for Red Hat* Enterprise Linux, including 32bit and EM64T version. OS:Red Hat* Linux

I loaded these drivers onto a USB thumb drive and started the FC5 installation with "linux dd".

The installation prompted me to select a driver image, which I did, and then it said it was loading drivers off of the thumb drive, and I believe it was.

But then, after it launched the graphical installer, it asked me to select the hard drive(s) onto which to install the operating system.

In other words, it did not see one logical drive that was RAID-managed at the controller level: it saw two drives!

Why? How can I get it to see the logical RAID array that Intel's RAID BIOS is telling me is set up properly?

I sincerely hope someone has run into something similar and can help me. I am stuck, Gateway is being uncooperative ("we don't support Linux installations"), and I have nowhere else to turn for help.

Thank you in advance,

Mike

[PilotJLR]

I don't know how to answer this question specifically, but you may want to consider using either RHEL or CentOS instead of Fedora.
In particular, www.centos.org is basically an exact duplicate of RHEL 4, except it's free. Most people feel it's more suitable for a production server, and the drivers you have would almost certainly work.

[mishspring]

Thank you. I am downloading CentOS to try it out, but I am concerned about switching to something I've never heard of.

I have been looking in the Fedora documentation trying to find a list of the hardware RAID controllers that Fedora *does* support and I can't find any such list.

I am surprised that a standard RAID controller built-in to an Intel motherboard would not be supported by Fedora. Are there onboard RAID controllers that are known to work? I can still return this server...

Thanks,

Mike

[PilotJLR]

CentOS is built directly from SRPMS off Red Hat's site. So, it's EXACTLY the same as Red Hat Ent Linux AS 4, except all branding is removed and the normal redhat-config-xyz apps are now system-config-xyz. It's basically Red Hat AS 4, without branding. The disadvantage, since it's free, is no commercial support (like Fedora, they have webboards) and updates come about 24-48 hours after the binary RPM red hat release.

So you can also use the Hardware Compat List off redhat.com with CentOS. Fedora, due to its bleeding edge nature, does not even have an HCL.

I can tell you that RHEL / CentOS does already include at least some RAID drivers. For example, the HP Smart Array controller in one of our DL360's was automatically detected and properly used right off the bat.

Also - I did this kinda quick, so double check the #'s, but your board appears to be fully supported in RHEL (so, by extension, also with CentOS):
https://hardware.redhat.com/hwcert/list.cgi?product=Red+Hat+Hardware+Certification&quicksearch=SE7520JR2

[mishspring]

Greetings,

Thank you for your patience.

I downloaded the CentOS 4.3 DVD and booted from there.

I was given two options: i386 or i586.

I tried both, with "dd" and without.

dd'ing, it sees my USB stick but can't read off of it for some reason.

Without dd'ing, it sees two drives, not one RAID array.

Now I am even more lost than before -- the one O/S that looked promising appears to not be working properly either.

More advice, please!!!

-Mike

[PilotJLR]

Just one idea right now... do you know if the proper image was copied to the flash drive using dd or rawwrite? In other words, if you browse the contents of the flash drive using a functional Windows or Linux computer, do you see an .img file, or several different files and directories?
The img file is an image, so it needs to be written in much the same way you'd write an iso to a CD.

If you haven't already tried this, check out the readme on the intel driver zip file, then use dd or rawrite to copy only 1 image file to the flash drive. Just make sure you're not doing a straight copy and paste!
More info here:
http://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/rhel-ig-x8664-multi-en-4/ap-driverdisk.html

[mishspring]

This thread is telling:

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4462&forum=29

Is it true that the board-level integrated RAID-1 solution is no better than the software RAID offered by the operating system? If so, I will go with software RAID, because no matter what I do I can't get it to see the drive array as set up in the BIOS.

[mishspring]

I tried unpacking the ISO file to the USB stick before, and Fedora didn't like that. It was literally looking for an image file. So when I put the .iso file there, it was very happy when it found it. CentOS, on the other hand, dies a horrible death when I choose this ISO file.

[PilotJLR]

I'm not sure why the driver itself isn't working... but, yes, most onboard controllers use "fake" raid. So, if raid level 1 is acceptable, then Fedora or RHEL can do that through software easily. You can't boot to software raid 5 (as far as I've seen)... so people with lots of drives can use a Raid 1 set for the OS itself, and a separate Raid 5 set for Data. This way, a single drive in the mirror boots, unlike all the raid compents get loaded and the mirror begins functioning and calculating parity for the raid 5 set.
Even most controller boards under about $300 or so are actually "fake" raid and rely on a driver to perform the raid functionality. The good hardware, like HP Smart Array, perform parity calculations and everything else on the controller, so it doesn't impose any load on the CPU or memory.

[mishspring]

Software RAID it is.

Now I'm on to a whole new set of problems!

I set up a partition table that looks something like this:

/
/boot
swap
/usr
/var
/tmp
/usr/local
/home
/home1

And I have these 9 partitions set up as software RAID through the OS installer.

When I try to boot the box, it won't boot!

I thought I saw something somewhere that said I have to have / and /boot be non-RAID partitions. But if I do that, it sort of defeats the whole purpose of setting up RAID. With / and /boot non-RAID, by two hard drives are now no longer symmetrically partitioned, so I wouldn't be able to hot-swap one out if it goes bad. Right?

I'm still learning about RAID so forgive me if that was an illiterate question. I'm just trying to figure out how to balance (a) software RAID; (b) maintaining hot-swappability of my two drives; (c) still allowing the box to boot.

Thanks!

[obviousheart221]

When I set up the data server at my office, I remember having a hard time setting up the software raid straight from the installation. So what I did was disconnect the second hard drive, and do the full install on just one drive. Then, inside the OS I configured mdadm to build the array and set up startup commands to activate the array on boot. I'm not sure if this is the route you can go or not, considering I have the OS on a seperate drive and the data on 2 RAID 1 drives. Just food for thought, I guess.

[ccrvic]

Software RAID it is.

A good choice.

I thought I saw something somewhere that said I have to have / and /boot be non-RAID partitions.

/ can most certainly be a RAID1 partition.

/boot is a bit trickier; it needs to be readable by grub, and I don't know whether or not grub can read RAID.

But TBH it's still perfectly good to use non-RAIDed /boot - just make a copy on the second drive & copy the partition image (and MBR) with dd. That way, if your disk fails, you can boot off the other drive.

With / and /boot non-RAID, by two hard drives are now no longer symmetrically partitioned, so I wouldn't be able to hot-swap one out if it goes bad. Right?

The trick is to make sure they *are* identically-partitioned :-)

Additionally, make sure you've got a bit of slack at the end of the drive - not all drives are the same size, so two "80GB" drives can differ in size by about 2GB (as I found out...). Using slightly less than all the drive means a (fractionally) smaller replacement will still work.

Vic.

[mishspring]

Vic,

Thanks for your response.


/boot is a bit trickier; it needs to be readable by grub, and I don't know whether or not grub can read RAID.

But TBH it's still perfectly good to use non-RAIDed /boot - just make a copy on the second drive & copy the partition image (and MBR) with dd. That way, if your disk fails, you can boot off the other drive.


Is there any chance you can tell me how to do that? I don't really speak dd, and I always screw things up when messing with MBRs... How would I do what you are suggesting?

Thanks,

Mike

[ccrvic]

I don't really speak dd, and I always screw things up when messing with MBRs.

dd is very simple - but you *must* check what you're doing. If you tell it to copy your blank drive over your live stuff - it'll do exactly as you say. Be very, very careful...

The essence of the command is

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=blah count=blah

Where
/dev/hda is the drive with a ldata on it
/dev/hdb is the clean drive
bs is the block size
count is the number of blocks to be copied.

If you bottle out, you can copy the MBR and partition table by restricting the copy to a few KB (16K should be plenty), then copying individual partitions, e.g.

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=8192

Then you don't need to compute any sizes :-)

Vic.

[mishspring]

inside the OS I configured mdadm to build the array and set up startup commands to activate the array on boot.

That sounds like the right approach for me. I am going to go try this and the dd thing now. Can someone tell me what the syntax of the mdadm command is, for this purpose, and how to activate the array on boot?

Thanks in advance!

-Mike

[mishspring]

A huge thanks to all who helped.

Setting up software RAID during the OS install is definitely the simplest way at this problem.

Next step: reboot to CD (or DVD) and do a linux restore.

Then, do the dd command as specified earlier in this thread.

Reboot again, and voila -- it works, it's RAIDed, and life is good.

Again, huge thanks to everyone who helped!

-Mike