Hardware RAID 5 Setup on Debian 3.01
 

OK, here goes. This is my first RAID setup under linux. My original thoughts were that it should be fairly easy and straight forward. Which I still believe it is. The problem I'm having is that I've configured a RAID 5 array using three 17GB seagate SCSI drives that are attached to channel A of an Adaptec AAA-133U2 RAID controller. Debian (v3.01, 2.6 Kernel) detects the hardware with no problems. My problem is this; once the debian installer gets to the partitioning stage of the install, instead of seeing one drive (the array) I see all three seagate drives individually? I've done quite a few Windows 2000/2003 server installs on RAID 5 arrays and it always shows up as one drive, as it should. I must be missing a step, (maybe passing special params to the kernel?). I believe I've given all the details I have at this point, if more information is needed for help, please ask. I'm stuck until I receive some higher knowledge than I have :).

I had a quick google around and a look at the download page for the AAA-133U2 and it doesn't look promising to be honest.

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/sup...duct/AAA-133U2

Normally you would download a driver, get it onto a floppy, and load the driver as part of the installation (before you reach the disk partitioning) and then you would have 1 single drive, not 3. Sadly it looks like there's not much in the way of linux drivers for your RAID card, from what I could tell from my brief search.

Have a look around and do some googling you may come across something, but if you have no joy, definately have a look into raidtools or mdadm for Debian. These tools allow you to create a software RAID, sounds like it would be rubbish I know, but in my experience the performance is pretty good and its quite easy to add/remove/rebuild disks once you've had a play with it. Good luck , hope you get it sorted,

Jim

I know, I usually do a lot of research before I pass the burden onto other lq members. I pretty much found the same thing you have, but with me never doing a RAID setup with linux before I wasn't sure if I was missing something, other than what I could turn up through google. I suppose I can try the software RAID, its just said because this is such a nice RAID controller :(. I'll continue to look, if you or anyone else comes across anything in the future please let me know.