I have an Asus P4C800-E with 2 120 gig SATA drives. The drives are arranged in a RAID set through the controllers interface. I previously had WinXP running on the raided volume so I know that is set up right. I'm using the install disk for Sarge and the 2.6 kernel. In the install process I can see it loading up the Promise modules and it recognizes my hard drives but it will not see them as a RAID set only individual drives, should it?. I have the option of configuring software raid but would prefer not to do this unless there is a very good reason to do so. Is there something I'm missing or is there a distro that recognized the raid set at install.

I've searched this site today to try and find an answer to this, but have only found problems where the controller itself wasn't recognized. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Ok after mucho reading I belive I've found out that the Promisie controller is not really true hardware RAID and I have to use Software RAID. 1-> Is this true?

Chip settings in the Promise are still the same (1 RAID 0 volume) I start to install Deb, get to the partman section, create my raid set, partition the raid disk disk, everythings happy. It writes the EXT3 (tried EXT2 for kicks) filesystem, gets to 100% on the first partition then errors out saying it cannot write the filesystem table. No errors that I can see in /var/log/partman tried mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 (list my drives) but it tells me that it cannot open "/dev/md0" or whatever I put there....um am I way off base but, isn't "/dev/md0" what I'm tring to create so I don't think it allready exists. 2-> Am I totaly screwing this up or do I have something screwed up?

Oh, but with the same chip config, I can partition and install directly to a single drive.

1->Yes Promise is an evil software raid company(I've had bad experiences with them). There are binary drivers that if installed allow the drive to be read from both Windows and Linux. However, these drivers not only have poor instructions, don't work that well, and have no usefull support offered from Promise, but as far as I know they never went through with there promise(pun!) to have 2.6.x drivers sometime in mid 2004. End story, you need to you the linux kernel's software raid.

2->You are trying to do a striped array I believe. Personally I found the performance of a striped array insignificant compared to using the 2 disks seperately, with the added risk of having a disk failure destroying both. Unless you want to use mirrored I would suggest just using them as 2 disks.

If you still want to proceed, I believe that after mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2, you need to specify an equal sized partition of each drive. That is you need to partition the drives and mirror the partitions, not mirror the drive and then partition.