10.2 install on raid
 

Hello there,

I've been using Suse for like half a year now and now that I bought my new computer, I sure do want it back on again!

The problem however is that I've got a raid0 setup on 2 sata 320g drives. theres already 500g data on it which I don't really want to loose..

I've already tried and the raid driver gets loaded automatically, but I get an error when install starts, stating that a raid group could not be created. The install sees the raid correctly though

Is somebody willing to guide me through the install on these raid disks? I've got an Asus p5b-e mobo, it has jmicron, but I think that's only for pata disks...

any extra info needed will be provided ;)

thanks in advance

Hello.
So. You have two hard drives setup as raid0. I'm not sure if you know what that means, so I'm going to kind of explain it. Raid0 "joins" the two drives by creating one drive, so basically you have one large drive. Now the data is stored evenly between the two drives. Which means, if you copy a file on your computer, 50 % of the data is stored on of the drives and 50% of the data is stored on the second drive. By this improves speed, because it's easier to write 50% of something to one drive then writing 100% of it. So you obviously have windows XP, and trying to dual boot with linux. Which should be possible. Taking in consideration that you have Jmicron, which is the RAID controller, and SuSE 10.2 has a module for that which gets loaded when installing from CD, that explains why your drive is recognized. And now i'm gonna end up telling you that, as far as my knowledge goes, you won't be able to dual boot WindowsXP and linux from a radi0 setup. Mostly because in order to install linux on the raid0 partition which is obviously formated as NTFS you would have to shrink that partition to make room for Linux. As far as i know, you can't shrink a raid0 setup. Maybe it's possible i just don't know about it. After taking a look at your mobo specs, i see that you have 4 SATA ports that aren't being used, and you also have an IDE port. You can choose to either buy another SATA or PATA drive and install linux onto that. It should work.
But before you go out and buy another drive, wait and see maybe you'll find a solution for your problem.
I'm sorry i couldn't be of more help, hopefully you'll find a solution.
Good luck to you.

I know what raid is :P It's a good explanation though and I'm sure there'll be someone around who doesn't know this already.

Now back to the matter, I got to install SuSe, but didn't get to do the raid thing, I kinda bought another drive (well, kinda... let's just say I did ;) Not because of your recommendation though, I was out of free disk space ) which I didn't include in the raid.

I've got some other problems though and although being a semi-experienced user, I'm a noob when it comes to linux, so I'll need help to get past these issues...

1) no bootloader: straight to win (I'm able to get to linux by booting from suse install cd though), grub gives me error 23 when trying to write to mbr and / or boot partition
2) I can't see my other two drives which are in raid setup, I saw them during install, but no where to find them in Linux anymore

I guess both problems need the same solution (suse can't write to raid, so isn't able to save bootloader). The question though is: how will I solve this issue?

SATA drives of this mobo are in some kind of hardware raid I think because they need to be set up in the motherboard itself (and don't require special software drivers afterwards, as opposed to jMicron). During install, the driver was loaded succesfully (together with such drivers as usb-driver). I don't really recall the name but I can look it up if needed.

Thx in advance for the help

Just to clarify one thing. Linux can write to RAID. Now i'm not sure what kind of filesystem do you have on the raid. Now if it is formated as NTFS, which probably is, because you have WindowsXP on it, then that would be a NO, linux can't write to NTFS.

1) The bootloader. You mentioned that you have installed another drive, which i assume is an IDE drive, now did you install linux onto that drive? if you did, then start linux from CD and rewrite your bootloader, and put on the same IDE drive. Then get in to the BIOS and just get the BIOS to boot the IDE drive before it boots any other drives. This way the drive with grub on it will boot first. You will have an option of selection which operating system to boot. If doesn't help, you can always install grub onto a floppy, and whenever you want to boot linux you will need to have the floppy in the drive.

2) About your two drives that you can't find. My guess is they just aren't mounted, so if you can mount it you should be able to see it, but if it's NTFS then you will have read only access to it. Unless you install a program which will enable you to write onto NTFS from linux. There is a project they are working on, and many people say it works for them. They have read/write access to NTFS from linux.
I don't know how much you know about this, and if i mention something that seems really obvious, my apologies i'm not trying to be rude. So i don't know if you know this or not. But raid devices usually show up in the /dev as md0 . You can run Yast-System-Partitioner and you'll be able to see the drives there if you need to mount them. If you can't see them, then linux doesn't support your sata controller, that's just a guess tho.

Well good luck. And sorry if offended you.