I have recently installed Fedora 7 on an ASUS M2N32-SLI/AMD Athlon Dual-core system, hoping to set up a RAID-1 disk set. I am not convinced that I have succeeded.

The mother board has two "RAID" control chipsets on it: an Nvidia MediaShield RAID controller (nForce 590 SLI chipset), and a Silicon Image SiI3132 Serial ATA controller. For this installation, I attached two identical 160GB Seagate discs to the Nvidia ports, defined a RAID set in the BIOS, and began the installation.

The kernel is 2.6.23.1-21. My BIOS says that a RAID set has been defined and is HEALTHY. I labeled the partition types = 0xfd. If I look at /dev/mapper, there is a device named nvidia_fjdddief, and several more with similar names (...p1, ...p2, etc), one per partition.

/etc/mtab correctly shows that the various partitions are using /dev/mapper/nvidia_fjdddiefp(n).

If I give the command
# dmraid -s
it tells me that there is an active set, and its status is 'ok'.

BUT, if I look at /proc/mdstat, it says

Personalities:
unused devices: <none>

All I have read on the net says that this output should show several
<raid(x)> entries after the Personalities: label.

Is this system actually working as a RAID array, or is it just pretending? I have the feeling that I know too little to settle this, but enough to be dangerous.

One rather low tech method would be to look at the drive lights while you are doing stuff. If one of them is idle, you don't have raid. Obviously, you need to keep learning, but that might just increase your comfort level at this point.