Kent West wrote: > I thought there was HARDWARE RAID and SOFTWARE RAID. There is. > Not knowing anything about it, I would have thought that with > HARDWARE RAID, you'd go into the BIOS of the special > drive-controller hardware (Ctrl-I in this case, just after the Consider this problem of using hardware raid from the motherboard. It is typically a proprietary scheme and can only be replicated on another similar motherboard. If while using this scheme your motherboard dies then you may find yourself with two perfectly good disks but no way to get the data off of them other than to find another similar motherboard. In fact even in environments with lots of similar hardware I have seen problems trying to move disks using hardware raid from one system to another while preserving the raided data. I recommend that you use Linux kernel software raid instead. It is quite reliable. On the negative side if your BIOS boots only the first disk and that is the disk that dies then the machine cannot be booted unattended after a disk failure even if the second disk has a full good copy of everything. You would need to rotate the drives in that case. > that then when you go into the installation of the OS (Debian, in > this case), the OS's partitioner would see one drive (the main one) > and not see the other one, because the hardware RAID controller After hardware raid is set up then original drive will not be seen but a single new raid raid device will be available. > I thought that with SOFTWARE RAID, all the RAID stuff would be done in > the OS, and there'd be no need for a hardware controller. Yes. With Linux kernel software raid all of the raid is done in software by the Linux kernel. This is completely separate from using on motherboard hardware raid. > But apparently this RAID hardware controller (Intel Rapid Storage > Technology - Option ROM - 9.5.0.1037) is some sort of hybrid FIRMWARE > RAID system. I recommend that you ignore the hardware raid and instead use software raid. The Debian installer can set up software raid for you at system installation time. It is easy. But it is also a little confusing. > If I set up the controller's BIOS screen to either RAID1 or RECOVERY, To use software raid you wouldn't set up any bios raid at all. You would leave the drives unconfigured so that each drive is available individually. > when I start the Debian installer and get to the partitioning scheme, I > see a single 700GB RAID partition with a 1MB unusable partition, and > then the /dev/sda and /dev/sdb drives. Any partitions you are seeing here are probably left over from the previous operating system that you had installed on the disk before. You will probably need to erase the old partitions and start fresh. > If I set up the controller's BIOS screen to non-RAID for the drives, and > then use only the installer's partitioner to manually setup all my > partitions on both drives, making them identical, and then use the RAID > option in the partitioner to create a RAID partition for each actual You have things in the wrong order. First erase all partitions, then set up the partitions for the physical raid. That will create a new logical device that is the raid of the two physical devices. Then set up your operating system partitions *once* on the newly created raid device. > partition and set mount points, the installer continues, but then won't > install grub or lilo. I always create a separate /boot partition because I also configure LVM and grub doesn't know how to boot off of lvm. Therefore a separate /boot (on a software raid /dev/md0 logical partition) enables grub to boot. (I am talking grub from Lenny stable and before. I don't know if grub2 in Squeeze and later adds this capability.) I still thinking having a separate /dev/md0 for /boot makes a lot of sense. Don't forget that you should also put your swap on raid as well. > In short, I have no idea what I'm doing, or how to do it. Take a deep breath. Sit in a calm place for a bit. Then go back to it and start again from the beginning. Configure the BIOS to not set up any raid at all. The drives are just two normal drives. Then use the debian-installer to erase all previous partitions. Start with a clean slate. Read through one of the many guides about installing Debian that will walk you through the installation process step by step. I always set up lvm and so off the top of my head I would repeat the steps for using lvm. I think lvm is the way to go but the extra layer may be too much for you here. In any case, set up the physical raid device first and then set up the system partitions afterward. Bob
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