[ale] Serial ATA install

[Chris Egolf]

Christopher Fowler wrote:
> I'm setting up a SATA install with FC2.  I have 2 disks that are setup
> in the SATA bios as RAID1.  In FC2 I see a /dev/hde and a /dev/hdg.  It
> appears that those are the two disks.  Should I ignore /dev/hdg?  
> 
Two things.  First, I don't think Linux/FC2 will recognize the RAID1 you setup 
in BIOS.  Unless you have drivers or you know the linux kernel supports your 
specific hardware RAID, linux will see your SATA drives as /dev/hde and 
/dev/hdg.  I'm not aware of anyone who makes hardware SATA RAID controllers that 
linux will use (maybe 3Ware?), and I'm pretty sure none of the onboard SATA RAID 
controllers included with most motherboards will do it.  If you want mirroring 
or striping, you'll need to use the Linux software RAID.

The second gotcha is something I ran into and haven't been able to find too much 
info on it.  I setup my 2 SATA drives under Fedora Core 2 as a RAID-0 /dev/md0 
device.  The install saw the drives as IDE drives like you described. 
Everything worked fine, until I applied all the FC2 updated RPMs, which included 
kernel updates.  Once I did that, the new version of the linux kernel saw the 
SATA drives as SCSI, so they were /dev/sda and /dev/sdb respectively.  I think 
the FC2 default kernel is 2.6.5-1 and the latest is 2.6.8-1.521.  I was able to 
repair things by booting in maintenance mode and updating the /etc/fstab and 
/etc/raidtab, but just be careful.

> 
> 
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                                Chris Egolf
              http://www.ugholf.net     cegolf at ugholf.net
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