I've been trying to set up my server recently and I am completely overwhelmed with all the documentation out there for setting up raid out there...and most of it is a little incomplete. If someone could provide some advice that would be great!

I want to run RAID-1 with 2 disks and I am booting off of a separate disk. The RAID array will store NON-ROOT data only...databases and other important data. I have a Promise SX-4000 and it seems as though using the ataraid kernel driver is the recommended solution.

All the guides say that I need to specify an append line, but I just cant seem to figure it out (i suck). If anyone could help me out, that would be so great. Here is the corresponding info from /proc/pci.

Bus 0, device 7, function 0:
RAID bus controller: PCI device 105a:6621 (Promise Technology, Inc.) (rev 1).
IRQ 18.
Master Capable. Latency=96. Min Gnt=6.Max Lat=18.
I/O at 0xec00 [0xecff].
I/O at 0xe800 [0xe8ff].
I/O at 0xe400 [0xe4ff].
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xdee00000 [0xdeefffff].
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xdefe0000 [0xdefe7fff].

If you don't want to actually boot off the thing (which adds a bit, though not much, complications), I think you are very close. I don't know what you'd do with the append option for the kernel, but I do without.

1) On the BIOS level, did you actually create a RAID set? That's what you need to do first (this will wipe all info from both your disks). This is where you set RAID levels, spare disks, etc. Since you said "I want to run RAID-1", it sounds like you haven't done that yet.

2) cat /proc/devices
... is there some ataraid mentioned?

3) then do fdisk /dev/ataraid/d0 (your actual name may vary, especially if you made more than one RAID set). This partitions like any other harddisk, e.g /dev/hda partitions into /dev/hda1, hda2, ... and /dev/ataraid/d0 partitions into /dev/ataraid/d0p1 etc.

4) format the partition(s) you created, mount, and you are done.

Hope it helps, else ask more.

mlp