Installing RHEL Enterprise 5.3 on 2 80 GB SSD RAID 0
 

Ok.... I am trying to install RHEL 5.3 on our system. I am having some issues with the installation.

I think the problem stems from the hard drives I am trying to install to.

We have 2 80 GB SSD drives in RAID 0. These are mounted in a StarTech Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane (HSB220SAT25B) This is where I want RHEL to go.

We also have 2 1.5 GB drives for data storage, but I don't want to put the OS on these unless I have to.

I enter the RAID setup and deleted the RAID and recreated it.

I am installing from a DVD and I have to switch the boot order to DVD driver first to be able to do so.

After I install, and reset the boot order, I am seeing messages about no disk being found. If I don't reset the boot order, of course I get the message the cd boot ready not ready, or something to that effect.

What is the proper procedure for this type of installation? Can I install to and boot from a RAID 0 device?

The system has a Asus P6T6 WS Revolution mobo which supports SATA RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5. When we put the system together we did burn in with Vista, and had a 30 day eval of RHEL running on the 1.5 GB drives.

Thanks,

CB

Raid Problem
 

Dear friends,


I don't understand your problem clearly. but i guess your problem. you may follow this.

1. At first you have to create one raid level 1 partition for /boot . Because /boot partition support only Raid level 1 and not support LVM.
2. Then you may create Raid level 0, 1, 5 partitions for the remaining system partitions ( /, /home, /usr, /var, /tmp ).

Thanks

Asraful's reply applies if you're installing software RAID as part of your setup in which case /boot must be installed in a regular (non-raid) partition or in RAID 1, is this what you're doing? From your post it seems that you're installing it in a hardware RAID 0 setup. So Linux should see it as a big hard drive and no software raid should be implemented.

If you're creating a RAID 0 array from the BIOS/firmware once you boot into the setup you should only see one big 160 GB partition. Correct? It could be that in your BIOS the boot order is not working for you, that is, you're not _really_ booting into that RAID 0 partition, so this is not a problem with the OS but with Bios/hardware.

The way Linux boots is as follows: BIOS > MBR (Grub if applicable) > /boot parition (wherever it resides, usually /sda1 SCSI or Sata or /hda1 if IDE)> Kernel > Init, etc, etc. So to me it seems you're not really booting into the MBR, to me it seems that your BIOS needs to be reconfigured to make that RAID 0 array the first boot device and not the other hard drives in that system.

By the way unless you have a backup system I wouldn't recommend using Raid 0 to install all your paritions under, due to the high risk of data loss should a drive fails.