[mdlug] Something to watch out for - motherboard RAID chips

[Mat Enders]

Something similar yesterday I did a new install of Debian 6 on a machine that used to have 5 on it. It has a pci raid card that is set to just work in jbod mode. The problem is that in Debian 6 it sees them first so that the drives on the card are sda and sdb then the ones attached to the motherboard are sdc and sdd. But the bios see them correctly so after install it does not boot.  So I disconnected the drives on the card then completed the install and it boots.  Today I am going to reconnect them and see if that will help. 
Mat Enders from my BlackBerry®

-----Original Message-----
From: "Ingles, Raymond" <Raymond.Ingles at compuware.com>
Sender: mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:15:02 
To: MDLUG's Main discussion list<mdlug at mdlug.org>
Reply-To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
Subject: [mdlug] Something to watch out for - motherboard RAID chips

I was recommissioning a computer for my kids. It once had two identical 120GB drives in a RAID setup, but I'd disabled that a while back. (Wanted more space, and no critical data was stored there.) The motherboard had some software-RAID support, but I hadn't used it in Windows, and when I originally installed Linux, it didn't support that chip.

On Sunday, I'd gotten a fresh XP install on the machine, but preserved some of the games and stuff. Then I went to install Xubuntu 11.10 AMD64 on the machine, and set up the install to remove some Linux partitions, create some new ones, and leave some free space. I only worked with the primary disk, and didn't bother looking at the other one.

This turned out to be a mistake. Apparently the Xubuntu installer thought to itself, "two identical drives, and hey - here's a RAID chipset! This must be a RAID system!" So it seems to have assumed a RAID-1 setup, and updated the partition table on the second drive. I haven't had time to discover if it actually overwrote data on the second disk, but since I didn't back up the old partition table (silly me), the data is lost anyway.

Like I said, there's nothing irretrievably lost, but I was almost done and now I have to repeat some work. I've gone into the BIOS and disabled the RAID chip, so hopefully *that* won't be an issue anymore...

---
Raymond Ingles, Software Developer, Compuware APM Business Unit      T +1 (313) 227-2317  raymond.ingles at compuware.com

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