I need to setup hardware RAID 1 on two harddrives on a Fedora Core 6 machine. I created a RAID 1 volume through the BIOS and proceeded with the Fedora Core 6 installation. When the FC 6 gui installation comes to the harddrive selection part it only sees one harddrive labeled as I did in the RAID bios section. At this time the FC installation gui throws up a message saying something like all "data will be erased". I click ok to proceed. The installation finishes and FC 6 now boots up normally when both harddrives are connected.

To test the functionality of the RAID, I turn off the machine, unplug one harddrive and boot up. This gives me a kernel panic or it says insert boot media. I don't know what else to try to make progress and test my setup.

I just want a hardware RAID 1 with two harddrives for a Subversion machine. Does anyone know what I can do to come closer to a solution?

thanks,
Adam

I'm not so sure about setting up the raid in the bios. I did a FC6 install about a month ago and it let me set up raid1 and a logical volume just during the install process. I didn't do anything in the bios.

I think you're talking about software RAID which, is handled by the kernal disk code. Hardware RAID manages it independently from the host. It presents only one harddrive to the host.

A few questions concerning your setup:

Suppose you power off, take out one harddrive and power back on. Does the removed harddrive have an exact copy of the remaining harddrive? Secondly will Fedora Core 6 boot up from the remaining harddrive as if nothing happened?

thanks

Fair enough. With software raid, I believe you have to "tell" the raid driver that a drive has failed and that you are removing it by using mdadm. Then you can physically remove the drive. If you don't, then it does "panic". Possibly you have to go into the bios and mark the drive as "failed" before unplugging.

I haven't tried that, and I don't think I dare right now. Too much important stuff on that drive. Also, I don't have the OS on the raid drive. I have one ide drive that contains /boot, /swap, and "/". Then there are 2 scsi drives in a raid 1 array that just holds data.

I don't think the hardware RAID from the BIOS will work because it wants me to install a Windows program that rebuilds drives on bootup.

I'm now configuring the software RAID like you did except I need to mirror the OS. This is proving to be difficult because the RAID utility in the Fedora Core 6 install will only mirror software RAID partitions. I want to mirror the software RAID parition and the /boot partition.

Does anyone know how to make the Fedora Core 6 RAID utility mirror the entire OS and not just software RAID partitions?

I now have a linux software RAID 1 array working.

These three guides are geared towards setting up a linux software RAID 1 array and were helpful to me.

http://www.texsoft.it/index.php?c=ha...grubraid1&l=it

http://www.howtoforge.com/replacing_..._a_raid1_array

http://fedoranews.org/mediawiki/inde...ware_mirroring

Great links! And thanks for the follow through! It's good to see how things get resolved.