I have an A7V333 motherboard with a Promise FastTrak Controller.
Using their utility, I have set up a RAID 0 striping array using 2x200GB hard drives.

I am *not* trying to install the OS on this array! I have completely installed debian etch onto a separate hard drive on a normal IDE port and it is working wonderfully. I would like to see this 400GB array show up as a single volume for file storage. The drives worked fine under windows (although it was necessary to provide a driver during installation). They showed up as one single drive and worked great. I would like to format the volume after it is working as one physical volume (I don't care about saving information).

I know I probably have not given enough information, but I don't know what else to provide. I've looked at lots of posts about raid, but most are either software raid or say that if it's showing up as two drives (which it did in the partitioner) then there's no hope. I did partition these during installation as physical volumes for RAID, but I can always reinstall Deb and do things differently.

Any links or information would be great. I'd be more than happy to provide any additional information.

Thanks in advance!

First,it is a Promise card,I own 4,they are not really full hardware raid cards like some 3ware and what not.
Must setup your card as JBOD.
From linux install,find your raid partitions or drives you want to use.
If promise support is built into the kernel,you should be fine.The box I am useing is Sidux,Debian unstable with Sidux kernels built off of Vanilla kernels.The promise support and mdadm support is built in.
Boot recognises my sata partitions fine.Mdadm assembles the raid arrays at boot.
If you dont have the partitions made,make them,but they must be made with type "fd".
Now build and assemble with mdadm.


example,dont use this example;


mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level 0 --raid-devices=2 sd{a,b}1

The above makes use of sda1 and sdb1 for the striped array.
There are plenty of options and switches you can use depending on needs.Look in man pages or mdadm --help.

Once created format as usual but useing md0.

Thats basic,if you need more details,ask.or google,there are plenty of detailed instructions but make sure its for mdadm and not raidutils or other software for raid.


cat /proc/mdstat should show the building process and status.



#cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sda1[1] sdb1[2]
979840 blocks, 32k chunk, algorithm 2 [2/1] [_U]
unused devices: <none>

Then add,when its finished,to mdadm.conf
mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Don't forget to find the uuid of the md0 array and make a udev rule for it,if the system didn't aleady do so.

If there is data on the array that you would like to keep, then install the dmraid package and run "dmraid -ay". After that, look in /dev/mapper for your partition.

I dunno why I always thought dmraid was a red hat thing,never used it on debian...cool tip thanks.

You're welcome. The proviso stand, though, that if you don't have data on the array and you're not dual booting Windows, then it's better to use mdadm. The theory behind this is that controllers can go bad and you won't be able to access. In practice, that's pretty rare, though. Plus, the developer of dmraid has informed me that in case of controller failure, just move the drives to a regular disk controller and dmraid will find them. It won't be able to boot from them of course, but it'll find them to access the data as normal.

Thank you so much ironwalker! My raid is working wonderfully!

Quakeboy02, I am definitely writing that one in the good ole' trusty notebook, but for this array, there wasn't anything I needed to keep. I appreciate the insight, though!

You are welcome,glad you got it going.
Enjoy!