Adaptec Hardware RAID not recognized
 

I am trying to put Gentoo Linux on a standard Intel x86 desktop which has an Adaptec 789x hardware RAID controller which is configured as hardware RAID1 with two 8GB SCSI drives which have been working fine under Windows Server 2000. When I boot onto the LiveCD it recognizes the Adaptec card and will load the aic7xxx module, but the output of dmesg (and the output of fdisk supports this) claims that it has individual access to each harddrive via /dev/sda and /dev/sdb but there is no registration of any type of RAID drive.

This is the second machine with which this has happened under the aic7xxx driver, and the other machine is running happily along using both drives with independent access via /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, even though the machine has hardware RAID1 also. The machine that is currently working had the same problem when I installed Fedora Core 2 - it only installed onto /dev/sda and when we switched which was the primary drive in the Adaptec BIOS, the computer mysteriously booted into Windows Server 2003, which had been its previous operating system and which had not been overwritten by the hardware RAID1.

Does anyone know what I am missing for configuring the LiveCD to recognize the hardware RAID setting on the Adaptec controllers? I can just use both drives and have two SCSI drives, but I would like to get the mirroring configured if possible. Thanks!

What's the exact fully qualified model of Adaptec Card. It's important.

I'm pretty certain that the one I was dealing with most recently was the 7898, but I will let you know if that is not correct. I wouldn't be surprised if they are both the same card, but the main one with the problem now is the 7898.

I can't find your adapter anywhere. If you find it on adaptec's site, post a link. Because it's a non-entity.

"Does anyone know what I am missing for configuring the LiveCD to recognize the hardware RAID setting on the Adaptec controllers? I can just use both drives and have two SCSI drives, but I would like to get the mirroring configured if possible. Thanks!"

If it was doing hardware RAID, with drivers in the kernel, you would set the RAID in the hardware RAID BIOS. If you can't do that, then you don't have a RAID card. You have a simple dinky host adapter with software RAID.

Issue at hand- you have 2 drives detected. You want to have them at RAID 1. Assuming your controller isn't dying or EMF'd, you can use Linux software RAID to mirror the drives.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html#toc4

I checked it again, and the controller shows up as an Array1000 and it's the Adaptec 7890/91.
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/sup...odkey=aic_7890

It doesn't mention too much about RAID on Adaptec's site, so I think I might be dealing with software RAID as you mentioned, in which case I'll talk to my boss about setting up the software RAID under Linux. Thanks for your help!

"AIC-7890 and AIC-7891 single-chip host adapters" Yea, it's not a RAID card. It's just a scsi card. Just follow the software RAID tutorial above.