Onboard IDE-RAID ???

UnrealSnowman · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2002 Posts: 3 Location: Denmark

I'm about to get a new computer for my workstation and have my eye set on running ide-raid (2x 80gb). This will run on the motherboards controller, eighter Promise or Highpoint's onboard controller.

But before I go out and put together a system I would like to get some info on the subject, some DO's & DONT's..
(ie: is there problems with some of the controllers and such)

Do you have any info to share, before I spend twelve nights trying to setup this raid-thingie in gentoo linux ? :wink:

Thanks in advance
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Yours
UnrealSnowman

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20585

You might try a search for RAID and see what comes up. There are some threads that cover booting to a RAID drive and other issues. I myself do not use RAID yet.
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klieber · Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2002 9:01 pm Post subject: Re: Onboard IDE-RAID ???

rommel · Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2002 9:22 pm Post subject:

dont do ide raid...those chipsets provided on the mother boards are not event that much of an enhancement under windows...they are CHEEEEEEP ....look at the cost difference between them ad the non-raid board by the same manufacturer

USE LINUX SOFTWARE RAID...it is fast and reliable adn offers the full spectrum of raid configurations....save yourself money and aggrevation and get a simple promise tx2 or tx4 "ide" controller for adding addition ide channels and use LSR

in gentoo the tools are available from the start to setup the raid array from the begining of the install...the only lil piece of information that was missing was that after you fdisk and create the /etc/raidtab you need to 'modprobe md' so that the setup can be seen....your raided drive will become /dev/md0...check out the articles section in gentoo and read the links it gives too.

UnrealSnowman · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2002 Posts: 3 Location: Denmark

Ahh.. "Seach", I must need glasses heheh :oops:

But all in all it seems to be a stupid idea to go for a HW (low budget) ide raid (..also considering the performance of a /real/ SCSI raid card)

- rommel -
"USE LINUX SOFTWARE RAID" you say, eh?.. This /does/ help performance ('stippin' mode)? What about resources, does it not eat the system down or is it handled mainly by the normal ide controller ? :roll:

btw: Thanks for the fast reply!

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UnrealSnowman

james · Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2002 11:51 pm Post subject:

This is alink off the Gentoo main page "articles" section.

I makes a good read and will save you $$$$.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-raid1/index.html
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Gentoo's and counting

rommel · Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2002 3:09 am Post subject:

i bought a 20 dollar promise tx2 ata 100 ide controller...my dvd is on hda my cdrw is on hdc and i have two ibm 60gxps on the promise that make hde and hdg...i partitioned them to have boot on hde1 and swap on hdg1...i made these equal in size 500mbs each....then i formed extended partitions for the remaining space and one logical drive in the extended partition for each drive...you must label these logical drives FD so that they will be started automatically at boot...then you create the /etc/raidtab that corresponds the raid you want to use....read the howto's...after this modprobe md to start the raid dev you have created and then you create teh filesystem you want...i used reiserfs on the /dev/md0 and ext2fs on the boot partition.

anyway i am getting 80mb/s read tranfers when i run hdparm -t /dev/md0

this is like runnnng my scsi cheetahs under my free bsd box....so yes it works....the best i have seen from an ide raid controller is the 3ware and it gets around 60mb/s but it costs alot more and i dont think its worth it...LSR is an excellent solution...i wish freebsd had a similar software raid...vinum and ccd are ok but cant have / on them...you would have to create it then migrate it to the / partition and hope nothing went wrong....just read the articles drobbins has written and follow the links he gives to the additional reading....no one should try anything other then this for linux unless you want real scsi hardware raid and even then i dont think you will do any better as far as the performance is concerned....you could create a LSR array witha scsi ultra 160 controller too...that will be what i do next...i just bought another tekram host adapter and two more cheetahs.

ciao

good luck and give it a try...you'll like it

UnrealSnowman · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2002 Posts: 3 Location: Denmark

Thanks a billion!

btw: that IBM dveloper resource /is/ great.. there are a few goodies in thier redbooks-section too.
(I was once OS/2 user :oops:

)
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UnrealSnowman

rommel · Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2002 11:50 pm Post subject:

no problem....its worth it to try LSR....you like it i am sure and its fully functional in that all levels are supported....and its something that is in the kernel already...you just to add the levels and compile them in...much better then hasseling with drivers adn 3 party crap.

have fun

ph317 · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2002 Posts: 43

Yes, you can make Gentoo work with the fake hardware raid controllers like Promise FastTrack. The only hard drives in my machine are two 40G Seagates, in a striped array on the raid controller (making one big 80G disk). I'm sharing the array with WinXP, and using Grub to boot both OS's. My relevant system specs:

Processor: Athlon-XP
MB: A7V333 (RAID version)
Onboard "RAID" Controller: PDC20276 (Promise FastTrack 133)

I used the 1.1 iso image to start the install, and I ended up having to customize the isntall CD for the right hardware support (I put gentoo-.2.419-r5 kernel on it, which has the correct ataraid support in it). The new 1.2 ISO may have the correct support built in already.

If you get a kernel booted that detects and uses your ataraid correctly - the disk will be available (under devfs anyways) at /dev/ataraid/disc0/disc and the partitions are /dev/ataraid/disc0/partX.

I've had some troubles where I have to reboot after changing the partition table, but it's not that much of a hassle.

The big gotchas concern Grub and mounting the root filesystem:

1) Make sure the kernel you build has support for the IDE controller, support for "ataraid", and support for either Promise or Highpoint ataraid variation compiled in, not as modules.

2) Don't install Grub from within linux. When you get to the final step of your Gentoo install, where you're supposed to run "grub" and do "setup (hd0,0)", etc.... - don't do that. Instead, install grub to a floppy disk, boot from that floppy, and then from the grub prompt on that floppy do your "setup (hd0,0)" and "root (hd0,X)" commands. You should then be able to reboot off the array. The reason is that hd0,0 doesn't mean the right thing within linux - but booted off of a grub floppy, you're back to BIOS drive mappings, and if your BIOS is set up correctly the raid array should be the primary HDD.

3) Just before the above, when you edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add an entry to boot your kernel, you need a special kernel option so that it can mount your root filesystem. Instead of what one would expect "root=/dev/ataraid/disc0/partX", you have to use the hex for the device major/minor numbers, like "root=7204". 72 hex is the major number for ataraid, and 04 would mean partition 4.

Those were the big ones, there might've been other stuff I forgot already. It *is* doable, there's just more gotchas than normal.

castor_fou · Posted: Fri Jun 14, 2002 9:34 pm Post subject:

thanks ph317 for this info.

i'm in the same conf, i was stopped by grub....

going to test this !

castor_fou · Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2002 12:54 am Post subject:

i'm really really close.

i've done a grub floppy , it finds my kernel but it is unable to mount my root partition.

my root is /dev/ataraid/disc0/part4

my grub config is :
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/bzImage root=7204
boot

i got a kernel panic :
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 72:04

could you please post your menu.list ?

thanks

c0s · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 4

i am having the same problem, any help is appreciated (other then telling me i should have done software raid

)

c0s · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 4

another thing i noticed, if i boot in with the cd now and chroot, etc, i no longer have /dev/ataraid did i forget to compile something in? i compiled in ataraid (not as a module) and the promise chip that was directly below it in the menu. was i supposed to also compile the one that is a few lines up? or what? i REALLY want to get this up.

c0s · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 4

ok here is what i am going to try and i will let you know if it works

modules howto section 7

boot to a ramdisk and then load then load the ataraid pdcraid drivers then let it mount the root filesystem, that ought to work.

c0s · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 4

ok i couldnt get the ramdisk working, it wanted a root= perameter oh well, i have another idea but i am at work now so i will try it later

BernieKe · Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2002 8:53 am Post subject: A Hardware RAID install howto

A Hardware RAID install howto

I'm using the hpt374 controller (highpoint)
(if you use another controller replace all hpt or highpoint with what suits you)

apart from what is written here: follow the installation docs!!!
boot (using min. a 1.2 install-disk)
type (this will create the raiddevice)

Code:

insmod ataraid
insmod hptraid
fdisk /dev/ataraid/disc0/disc
when making filesystem: use the /dev/ataraid/disc0/partX notation
when choosing kernel-options: select hpt366 chipset support, support for IDE Raid controllers and Highpoint 370 software RAID
in fstab: use the /dev/ataraid/disc0/partX notation
instead of grub, i suggest using lilo

Code:

emerge lilo
cp /etc/lilo.conf.example /etc/lilo.conf
nano -w /etc/lilo.conf
when editing lilo.conf:
- as bootdevice: select the first hd of your raid-setup (in my case: hde)
- and as root: use the /dev/ataraid/d0pX notation
type (X is your root partition number):

Code:

exit
ln -s /dev/ataraid/disc0/partX /dev/ataraid/d0pX
mount -o bind /dev mnt/gentoo/dev
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
lilo

normally lilo should succesfully have written to the mbr
exit, umount everything (including the /mnt/gentoo/dev !!!) and reboot
if you are unable to umount /mnt/gentoo, make sure you have umounted
the other mounts in /mnt/gentoo and try logout, after loging out, try to umount again, it should work now
PRAY, no, seriously, this should work!!!

hope this helps someone,
Bernard
aka BernieKe

GurliGebis · Retired Dev Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 509

BernieKe, how about the Promise controller, what shall you do there?
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BernieKe · Posted: Tue Aug 27, 2002 2:21 pm Post subject:

instead of hptraid, use the pdcraid module

in kernel config, select

GurliGebis · Retired Dev Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 509

thanks, going to surgest the team to add the information to the installation howto
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Queen Rocks.

ErrorCode · n00b Joined: 28 Aug 2002 Posts: 2

Hello,

I just installed Gentoo 1.4 (from a stage3 tarball) on a Promise raid controller (2 60GB ATA133 Harddisks - striping) on an AUS A7V333 motherboard. Thanks to all of you; I don't think I could have gotten it to work without the tips I found in this Forum.

Some additional comments:

c_kuzmanic · Posted: Sun Sep 15, 2002 2:03 pm Post subject:

YEHAAA!!!

After much pain and hassle with grub, I finally got my software raid arrays installed and running

Two Maxtor ATA133 IDE Disks, RAID0 using Reiserfs:

hdparm -t /dev/md1 = 93 Mb/s

:lol:

tore- · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 32

GurliGebis · Retired Dev Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 509

I compiled my kernel without editing anything, and it works for my Promise RAID system. (Just had to enable the controller in the kernel)
Then I made a grub boot disk, and bootet from that one, and installed grub on hd (0).
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Queen Rocks.

tore- · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 32