Hi All,
I've searched the net for two weeks and can't find a solution. I'm sure its out there but I just can't find it.
Anyway, I'm creating a file server for my work. I bought a barebones PC and put Fedora 3 on the main HD. Then I bought a Rocket Raid 1640 card and 4 SATA 320Gb drives. Installed all those. The BIOS was able to configure the RAID array. Next I used Webmin to create a primary Linux partition on that Raid array. So now I have a 895Gb drive. Then I tried to use LVM (thru Webmin) to create a logical volume so that I could access that drive. I think it worked because it took a lot of time and created 7155 inodes. But I can't seem to access the drive. I tried to mount it and got the error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/Raidvol/Raidvol00 or too many mounted file systems.

So did I do the steps incorrectly or missing steps or just totally wrong? I'm kind of a newbie at this as you can see.

It is better to use Linux software RAID instead the one that comes with the Highpoint RocketRAID 1640. Setup two RAID 1 (mirroring) devices and add to the LVM. LVM will try to set it self in RAID 0 by default. You will only get 640 GB (596 GB to be more precisely) but you get reduntancy and the ability to expand in the future. I have not yet setup a mixture of RAID 1 and LVM. Though it should work.

Thanks for the suggestion. I actually want to run Raid 5. But since it seems most people think software RAID is best, I'm installing that using Webmin.

But I still would like to know what I should have done if I wanted to use hardware RAID. After all, if I'm using software RAID why did I buy the Rocket Raid card at all? In the future should I have just bought more IDE controllers instead?

As far as i know the RocketRaid uses a "fake" raid, that is, it is really a software raid anyway, provided by the driver and thus difficult with Linux. Try searching under "fake raid" and Linux and see what you get. So your software raid is really as good or better than your "hardware" raid on the Highpoint unit. I have the same problems here. If you want real hardware raid, then try a 3Ware unit. You won't look back again. The 3Ware units are just soooo much easier to use in Linux as they are a true hardware raid. It is as easy as setting up your normal hda (our latest servers boot from the 3ware raid and thus have redundant OS drives!).

Hope this helps!

It is best run Webmin after you got everything working. Use SSH instead.

Using software RAID level 5 needs at least a dual processor system because RAID 5 does consume a lot of resources. Like rishiv, I also suggest 3ware to be use instead if you want RAID 5. It is cheaper to use multiple RAID 1 arrays and add them to LVM when you need more space in the future. RAID 5 setups are fixed so plan on the largest capacity your wallet can handle.

RAID 0 and RAID 5 are serial setups which means one file can only be access at one time. For a file server, OS, web server it is best to setup RAID 1. RAID 1 can access two or more files, so it is parallel setup.