Problems adding Highpoint 1520 Raid 1 array to working RH9
 

Hi All-

I have a working RH9 install that boots off a single 20gb IDE drive. I've just added a Highpoint 1520 Rocketraid card with 2 sata 250gb Seagate drives.
I went into the raid card's bios and created a Raid 1 (mirror) array. Then booted into RH9 and I do:
# insmod scsi_mod
# insmod sd_mod
# insmod hpt37x2.o
And they all load...the latter giving me a message about the kernel being tainted..but I assume that's no big deal.

Then I do fdisk /dev/sda and create 1 big partition.

Now here's the problem:
When I do mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 it writes about 18 inodes and then hangs/freezes.

Any idea what to try next?

Thanks in advance.

Use Linux software RAID instead of Highpoint's software RAID. If you do want to use Highpoint's software RAID, you have to use dmraid.

Make sure the kernel's Highpoint software is not compile as built-in because you are going to have trouble. If it was compiled as a module, then you may need to rename it before compiling and installing the software from Highpoint.

As with all partition making and formatting. You have to reboot the system after making partitions. Make sure you use partition type 83.

Seagate SATA hard drives are a piece of crap because they use more processing power, they are dam slow, and they are very picky when enabling DMA. I suggest using Western Digital or Hitachi SATA hard drives. I suggest using Seagate IDE/SATA drives as only backup drives.

The device /dev/sda is the first port on the controller. It is not the RAID array. I am sure you saw /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

Thanks for the reply. So do I not need to use the hpt37x2.o at all? Is there a good howto somewhere that would help with the setup of Linux software RAID with the highpoint controller? I think I just need a little help to get going...

Alright.. got it sorted out... Here's what I've learned..(please anyone correct me if I'm wrong):

Contrary to what I thought, using the Highpoint driver is really still just 'software raid' since all of the computational work for the RAID is done by the driver using the computer's resources. That being said, if you're stuck using software RAID, you may as well use the linux native software RAID since it's more mature, stable, and flexible that Highpoint's drivers allow for. (For example, you can do RAID5 with Linux software RAID, but not with Highpoint's drivers.)

Once I figured out what I needed to do, this page walked me through everything I needed to set up the array:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...e-rhlspec.html

Hope this helps someone else...