Hi all,

I have a hardware raid card that has two 80gb drives configured in Raid 0. It is a Sil Image 0680 Raid / ATA controller card (PCI).

The BIOS for the Raid card is not loaded until the boot sequence is handed to the card at which time the striped drive boots fine. Booting off the Linux CD prevents the striped drive from being made visible to the bios.

As a result the Linux install sees two drives with bad drive info and refuses to install to the striped drive. Even creating fee space and/or new partitions under windows does not help.

Running the Dos install util under windows appears not to work either. The option to "install" does nothing.

Does any one have exeprience or suggestions to install to a striped raid 0 drive whose bios is not loaded unless the boot sequence is set to Hard Disk rather than the preferred CD boot for the Linux boot CD?

TIA

Mal

Try setting the boot sequence to hard drive, CDROM. If the raid drives have no boot signature, it should fall over to CDROM AFTER setting up the striped RAID.

I'm afraid that the suggestion does not work. The RAID card immediatley passes the boot sequence to the (active) Windows partition. The CD-ROM boot sequence is not entered into. There is not an option on the RAID card to pass the boot loader sequence to anything other than the active partion on the RAID (striped) drive.

Thanks for looking though.

Ah, are you trying to set up a dual boot system here?

Yep, dual boot.

I have BootMAgic installed but this is apparently unusable to manage the boot loader because the any partition or free space can only be seen once the RAID card's BIOS has loaded, which is too late for a CD-Boot set up.

Do you have other ideas about this?

I wonder how one would access that RAID card if they weren't booting from it... I.e., booting from another hard drive, and using the RAID only for data.

I don't want to have the hassle of installing another drive on the motherboard IDE channel to boot from. I have a very fast striped set with plenty of space on it.

Windows XP had drivers and recognised the RIAD 0 set on its install. I was hoping Linux would too.

Linux probably does have drivers for it. I was under the impression you couldn't even see it though.

Linux boot can "see" something, but not the striped set. It seems to think i have two 80 Gb drives with one having oodles of free space, with the other full. Which is not the case. In practice my 160Gb striped set has about 70Gb free.

Which distribution are you trying to install? What kind of raid controller card are you using?

Mandriva Linux 2005 LE.

Silicon Image SIL 0680 Raid ATA 133

An update....

I thought, WTF and added an old ATA66 drive on a spare IDE slot on the M/B to install Linux on.

Well, what a tangled web Linux is weaving for me........

When I have selected the appropriate partition (already made available under partition magic) on my extra drive, and set up a swap partition on the same drive, Linux tries to install but immediately tries to write to the "striped" drive which it does not properly recognise (no drivers loaded?).

I get this error:

"An error occured
mounting /dev/hde1 in directory /mnt/mnt/win_failed
(no such file or directory)"

And I cannot get any further. The install refuses to put itself on a drive which is solely for its own use because it insists on setting up a striped drive for which it has incorrectly identified / or cannot communicate with the cards' BIOS properly.

I even tried booting off a dos floppy to see if there were any "dos" install batch files on the Linux boot CD. But there isn't. The "DOSUTILS" is for WIN32 application only. So although I managed to boot off the floppy with the RAID card BIOS loaded OK, there doesn't appear to be a true 16bit Dos application to install the Linux.

I was so looking forward to running Linux. What a disappointment. Oh well, it's back to Mr Gates and Micro$oft for me.

A further update.....

I realised that I could designate the additional drive as the preferred first boot device under Hardrives in the BIOS. As this drive does not have an OS on it the boot sequence should then pass to the CD-ROM.

My assumption in this was correct. The PC booted, loaded the RAID BIOS tried to boot off the MB IDE channel and failed and then loaded the boot CD on Mandriva. Success!!!

No!!

The install routine still incorrectly identified the RADI card and still thinks my 160Gb striped drive is 2 x 80 Gb drives with "empty" space on each of them. It identifies there is a Win partiton and an empty partition (was for Linux) but the rest of the striped drive(s) is seen as empty. As a consequence when it tries to install itself on the extra drive it tries to write information about the RAID drives and still fails with error described in the previous post. Aaargh!

Me thinks the install routine will fail no matter what I do due to the non recognition of the RAID 0 set up.

I am not familiar with the Linux distro you are using, but with Redhad and SUSE you can give boot instructions before you load anaconda. You should be able to load RAID drivers at that point before you begin the install and partitioner. You need to load those RAID drivers, just as you would with a windows install.

As far as I can determine, because the RAID implementation is at the hardware level, Windows doesn't need any raid software configuration. All it needs to do is communicate with the card. The card handles all the RAID stuff and just presents RAID 0 Striped drives as a single "normal" drive to Windows.

When (any) Linux boots off the CD it must be able to talk to communicate with the RAID hardware properly. The RAID on the drive(s) is already implemented within hardware. LINUX should be able to install to the striped drive as if it was a normal drive because the raid is already loaded. Under normal circumstances LINUX could install its own RAID implementation but in that instance it cannot boot off a RAID 0 (or 5) partition. It needs a non-raid partition to install and boot off and only then can it implement RAID 0 on the remaining FREE space on the drives.

As Windows install just talked to the RAID card fine and was happy for the card to manage the RIAD 0, windows just installed fine into a partition I created within the striped drive. LINUX apparently has a problem speaking with my RAID card and as a result it "sees" both my drives on install, but I know the drives are already striped and performing as RAID 0. Linux sees any partition after my windows partition as "free space" and has an error when it tries to write to a DEV type folder the details of the drives.

I think my Linux install is borked, becuase I cannot even install it to another blank drive coz it insists on trying to (incorrectly) identify the RAID 0 drive.

Bummer.