Installing FC6 for my athlon64 I ran into a problem. my hardware is:

Gigabyte GA-M61PM-S2 MB (has an nvidia geForce6100 and nForce 430)
I'm using the onboard video
2x 500gb SATA 3.0Gb/s HDDs


I'm NOT using the MBs RAID controller. BIOS detects both HDDs.

When I get to the time to partition the disks, I don't see both HDDs. All that shows up is one device called /dev/mapper/nvidia_aaadcefg. It shows it to have 500GB of space on the device. I just want to set up a simple RAID 1 but I'm confused as to what to do. If I click on the "RAID" button, it lets me go through the setup, but I'm not sure how it's going to set it up without a 2nd drive. I went through the install without using RAID and once it boots up, I can see both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. everything seems to be running just fine.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've been using Fedora/Redhat for years but this is my first attempt at building a machine with RAID.

just an update for anyone searching for an answer to this.

I was unaware that the nvidia drivers already in the kernel "understand" the RAID controller built into the MB. I simply went into my BIOS, and turned on RAID for my drives. Next I booted with "linux rescue" to get to a command prompt. I ran fdisk on /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and changed all my partiton types to fd - linux raid autodetect, then I just rebooted the system normally. Everything is up and running as I would expect.

once the machine has booted I can run fdisk /dev/mapper/nvidia_aaadcefg. printing the contents shows the filesystem types to be what I expect them to be: /boot is ext2 swap is of type swap, and / is ext3.

Yes I know it's not a true hardware RAID, and that it is a fakeraid solution. I know the tradeoffs/limitations and I'm OK with them.

Hope this helps somebody aviod the aggrivation I went through with it

Hi,

Sorry to disturb.

I would like to know if, as a beginner, I can choose this motherboard (I will not use raid options).

Will I need to do something special ("difficult" download of the drivers..., some chipset not reconize...) if I want to use this motherboard on the last Ubuntu (Internet, watching and listening movies, writer, calc, apache and potsfix for fun).

Thank you

raakhbaba

late response, but better late than never...

yes, this MB works well with both fedora and gentoo. I have not tested it with other distros

Thank you,

I choosed an Asus P5LD2-VM DH. On Ubuntu 6.10 - edgy eft - nothing to do, no drivers to download, absolutly nothing.

raakhbaba