I have been trying to set up my on board raid allay but i have just made things worse. I have an ambit AT7 with hpt374

When i set the array up in the bios and boot the Slackware cd it is detecting both ide drives and not the array and i have n idea where i am going wrong.

Also while i have been doing this i backed all of my data on to a spare hdd which went pop and started smoking. So i have deleted the raid array and restored my partition table and have all my data but i have not been able to boot from the drive. Everything is set fine but it just sits at verifying dma data then boots from cd when it gives up. i have booted my system from the cd and reinstalled lilo but still have the same problem.

So now my questions are

Can i get raid 0 to work with this hardware and Slackware 12.2 ? If so is it possible to set it up without data loss?

How can i make my drive bootable again? (i have read that people have had problems and had to leave the pc powered down for 15 mins to make it boot again which i will try now)

I have read allot trying to get this sorted and people seem to think software raid would be quicker is this true? and can i install it without data loss?

Thanks

Sav

Sounds like a bit of a pickle you're in there...

To get the Onboard raid to work you'll likely need to use dmraid or as you say Linux will just see them as two separate drives.

I would seriously recommend you just use Linux software raid as it will be much less trouble (and likely perform better).

Are your drives currently part of a raid set or are they just single drives?

It is possible to build a raid1 set without losing data but not raid0.

Thanks for the reply.

They are now just single drives the drive with all the data i want to keep is working just not booting unless i use the install disk. The backup disk is dead so no backup outside of the disks i am using for the raid.

when i run lilo i get the message below (i have ran it before and received this error from live cds etc and had no problems).


I have been looking at software raid and only found guides for not loosing data with raid 1.

If understand what i have been reading though i can create raid arrays using partitions instead of disks so would i be able to create a 5gb partition on each drive then set the array then copy / to that array then the same for other partitions update lilo and fstab then i should be running raid 0.

If that does work is it then possible to add another partition to the array so can add space to the array as it becomes available.

Your Lilo messages there are just warnings so it did in fact install Lilo to where ever you told it to. Perhaps you need to revise your lilo.conf.

Yes as I said I don't think it's possible to do this with RAID0. You can however do as you suggested and resize your partitions and create new raid partitions (Type fd).

I'd strongly advise against this at this time as you have no backup...

not only is it risky to resize partitions, you are in fact increasing the risk level by moving your data from a single disk to a RAID0 array. You will then have double the chance of a disk failing... With RAID0 if one disk fails then all of your data is toast.

Personally I'd get another backup solution sorted out first and then continue with your plan.

Some links that might help you.

http://www.userlocal.com/articles/ra...ware-linux.php
http://www.userlocal.com/articles/ra...ackware-12.php
http://transamrit.net/docs/slackware/README_RAID.TXT

I have managed to fix the boot issues now.

The partition table had the wrong number of heads set so was causing problems and fdisk was not saving the corections.

So i tried moving the boot= to the other drive and received an error saying that the bios was reporting 2 drives with the same id, I tried unplugging the other drive with no luck.

It turned out to just be the jumpers changed both to cable select then was able to update the partition table and then install lilo again.

Thanks again for your help and i think i will wait till i get another drive before trying again.

Sav