NVidia RAID1 Rebuild

[blunck2]

Hi all,

I'm posting here because I can't find any other resources online and I'm hoping that somebody else has an NVidia fake-RAID controller and is in a RAID1 configuration.

I've boostrapped my system using Gerte's gen2dmraid ISO, have installed a stage3 tarball, and have managed to get grub installed onto my hard disks (they show up as /dev/mapper/nvidia_agcadhhg). Everything is running swimmingly...

I wanted to test failure modes of the array. My first attach was to pull a SATA cable while the OS was running. When I did so I noticed that the OS went unresponsive. This is inconsistent with how other RAID1 devices I've worked with behave - is what is essentially a lockup (although I cant Alt-F2 to other consoles, but cannot login or do anything related to the disk) the failure-mode by design for an NVidia fake-RAID? Has anyone else tried yanking the SATA cord on an NVidia fake-RAID, and if so, did your system continue to chug along?

After a hard reboot (Ctrl-Alt-Delete wouldn't respond), the BIOS posting of the RAID configuration reports the array in degraded mode. I power down, reconnect the drive, and power up. Here comes my second question: after a cable-failure, does the installation of the same disk into the RAID result in an "OK" RAID configuration? It seems to me like if no data was written to the disk then the array might be intact (and given the failure mode I described above no data was written to the disk ). But other RAID1 systems I've worked with (Promise FastTrack and HPT) will force a block-by-block rebuild of the array even if the same disk is re-installed.

Lastly, I thought I'd give a shot at mirror'ing to a "fresh" disk. My array was healthy, and I shut down the computer. I unplugged one of the drives, and plugged in an identical new disk. When the BIOS RAID came up it reported the array was not healthy. I smacked F10 and chose the Rebuild option. I expected for the rebuild to take a long time because the disk is a 160GB Seagate. But the "rebuild" took a split second. It seemed like the "rebuild" only flashed the configuration over from the original disk to the new disk. Does that seem right?


I'm hoping that somebody will be kind enough to take a few moments to respond to these questions. I can't find any useful information on the nvidia forums, and Google is full of everyone using Windows. The only people I can think of that might have this hardware and put it through it's failure paces are you guys. Please take a moment and respond if you have any insight or thoughts.


Thanks again (and thanks specifically to Gerte!)

-Chris