I just purchased a new Asus A7V333 motherboard with built in ATA 133 raid. (using the promise 20276 chipset.) Despite a few installation problems (Need to append acpi=off to install line) I finally got linux installed.

Linux sees the RAID 0 (Striping) perfectly. But I have to boot the installed system from the CD, as Grub (default) and Lilo only give me about 5 lines of 01 01 01 on my screen. How can I install a bootloader on striped hdds? I was thinking about using another small (1gb or less) hdd just to install a bootloader on, but is there another way?

Any help would be appreciated.

Steve

When you say Linux sees RAID0 perfectly, does that mean the installer recognized the disks connected to your raid controller channels?

I have never had the luxury of having hardware raid, but I would think that the bios would show your striped disks ( assuming you have 2 X 100 GB) as a single 200GB to the OS. What device names are you using to configure your boot loaders?

The installer for SuSE 8.1 sees one 120GB hdd as apposed to the 2 60GB hard drives actually installed. SuSE also recognizes the fact that it is looking at a raid controller and has appropriately named the hdd(s) something like /dev/ataraid01 (or to that effect at least) I don't know how raided drives handle what would normally be the master boot record. As Grub or Lilo default to (and I would prefer them to reside in) the MBR it seems as though it doesn't get written to or read properly.

BIOS sees 2 seperate hdds, as the raid doesn't scan or become active until just after BIOS is finished. The promise 20276 chipset isn't "true" hardware raid, and thus requires a bit of drivering to achieve it's goal. It works well under linux when I've booted from CD, and is also quite functional ´(and speedy) under... [shudder]... windows.

Any thoughts?

--Steve

I have close to the same setup (Msi mobo with the same promise raid and 2x60 gig hds)

I tried to install gentoo first, and it had problems booting (it did however, create grub on the mbr) and now after I installed SuSe on the 20gig partition that gentoo was on, it still has the gentoo grub bootloader, and lilo / suse can't write to the mbr. Any help?

I have the following in my lilo.conf

boot=/dev/hda


/dev/hda is one of the disks on a non raid partition that contains /boot used by RedHat on /dev/hda1

I also have a copy of boot on /dev/sda1 which is used by Mandrake


I think /dev/sda should work, but I have not tried it. Well at least I have not rebooted. I did install it to /dev/sda and no errors were returned.

My system bios has boot from scsi, so I guess it will work, but I have been booting from /dev/hda



lilo -b /dev/sda
Ignoring entry 'boot'
Added Mandrake-9.0 *
Added RedHat-7.3
Added WinXP
Added Floppy



sda = whatever the name of your device is

I think I'm just goint to bite the bullet and add another non-raided harddrive to my system. Crap... more disk space :-)

I use software raid on my standard ide controller on another machine, I will work fine

boot=/dev/md0


/dev/md0 = /dev/hda1 + /dev/hdb1

mirror raid ( by the way /boot must be mirror not striped )

I only have two HDs and I have them set to raid 0 (which windows uses) so I can't switch it to software raid in linux.

Anyone know how to fix this?

BTW: here is a long desc of my problem:
"I have a dual boot system (once linux will boot, currently using Windows XP) running on a raid 0 setup. I have a Msi kt3 Ultra2-R motherboard with Promise 20276 on-board raid.

I have tried to install a few linux distros, including gentoo which installed everything but had problems booting (raid problems). It did however, install grub on the MBR and gives me the options of Gentoo or XP. Because that install didn\'t work, I proceeded to install SuSe onto the same partition that gentoo was installed on. It installed fine, but when trying to write lilo to the mbr, it failed.

After trying to fix it for a few days with my friend, we have not been able to write lilo to the mbr. Also, we noticed that gentoo\'s boot partition still exists, even though the SuSe install should have wipped it along with the rest of Gentoo.

Do you know how I can get lilo (or grub if it works with raid 0) to install correctly on the mbr? I would really like to start using SuSe on my machine "

Thanks

Well, if you have, or know somebody who will give you a small harddrive that you can set aside from the raided partitions to install the bootloader on, that will work.

I got mine up and running with an extra 30gig, but anything over 10 MB should work fine.

I don't have one...or the money to get one . I know that people have got it working on raid 0 though. How, I'm not sure

You could try to install lilo on the mbr of the first disk of the array

lilo -b /dev/hde

or whatever it is

would installing it to only one disk cause problems with the raid 0? I'm not sure how the MBR works

I'm not sure. And it needs to be tested.

I do not think it would be a problem.

Raid uses partitions like everything else.


I have no way to test it. It will require someone who has the resource and can recover from a total failure.