Installing gentoo on a SATARaid system

[riceri]

Is there any guide to how to install Gentoo on a system with SATARaid??

I got a SiI 3112 SATARaid controler on a Abit NF7-S motherboard.

[trooper82]

a quick search found this

sataraid

Not an actual guide but some good info

the forums are full of good stuff, just got to do the

searching
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[sneakerski]

hey. i've got the exact same motherboard as you, and am running RAID 0 right now from the 3112A onboard SATA controller. I'm using the 2.6.0-mm2 kernel, and i get right around 110MB/s with 2 Maxtor 160GB Plus 9 drives. very happy. 2.6.1-rc1 was horrible performance, along with the stable 2.6.0.

now about the install. i didn't even attempt it from the live cd, the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels they use don't have proper support for the raid controller AS FAR AS I KNOW, but note i DIDNT even try them.
how I did it:
had a working gentoo install from my other box, it was compiled all with -march=pentium2, but that ofcourse still worked on the Athlon. i simply downloaded and compiled a 2.6 kernel with support for all the hardware in my new machine (and the stuff in my old machine so i could test it booted correctly).
don't forget to compile IN RAID 0 or 1 or linear support (which ever you're using), Nvidia and AMD IDE, Silicon Image support.
emerge raidtools
download a stage1 install, or if you want, download a stage2 or 3 AthlonXP install and save it to wherever. i saved my stage3 to my home folder.
i then pulled this IDE drive from the old box and put it in my new box (as primary on IDE1)
booted into an old 1.4rc1 livecd i had lying around and setup lilo to load from my IDE hard drive. rebooted.
booted into the IDE hard drive's working gentoo install, 2.6.0-mm2 kernel. i then proceeded to follow the Linux Software RAID 0 Guide which can be found at
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=68706&highlight=software+raid
basically, what it covers is a normal install as per the official guide, but with a few extra steps to set up raid.
first, mount the hard drives. /dev/hde and /dev/hdg are the hard drives on the SATA controller.
second, run fdisk on each, and make the EXACTLY same partitions on each. mine is 100mb boot (on each hard drive even though boot cannot be raid), 768MB swap (on each drive, they have equal priorities in fstab, it's almost the same as using raid on them - i haven't cared to try it w/ raid), the rest goes to / (and is software raid 0)
now, setup your raidtab
mkraid whatever the command is
mk filesystems NOTE: i had all kinds of problems with reiserfs. i'm not sure why, maybe it's 2.6? maybe it's raid? maybe it's me? heh, but i'm using ext3 now, it's fully stable. haven't tried jfs or xfs.
mount /dev/md0 as /mnt/gentoo
cp stage{1,2,3}-version.tar.bz2 /mnt/gentoo
cd /mnt/gentoo
tar -xvjpf stage*.bz2
chroot into it.
continue normally for a while. MAKE SURE TO COPY YOUR RAIDTAB FILE OVER TO THIS PARTITION
getting the bootloader to work was a bit weird, if i remember correctly what i did was umount /dev/md0 and install it from my IDE hard drive to the first chunk of /dev/hde1, but uh...it took me a while to figure out and i don't clearly remeber. (one of those 3 in the morning break throughs when you got school at 7 and still an essay to do)
shutdown, pulled the ide drive, and booted up, wallah, it worked
good luck man - for me it was a nice challenge

[alyo]

is this te procedure that you have to go through when u install or can i use to install it to an already-installed gentoo?

[sneakerski]

when you use raid 0, half the files (literally half each file - usually) is on each hard drive, if you have a working install and wish to make it raid...i haven't a clue if you can without using a third non-raid partition (or hard drive)
raid 1 on the other SHOULD (in theory) work fine by simply adding the second drive and setting up raid, but i've never tried this or read up on it

my way was for installing gentoo onto a brand spanking new system