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

[Aaron Kulkis]

Ingles, Raymond wrote:
> 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.
> 


This is one reason why I don't like Ubuntu, or any other
distribution (or desktop) in which those in charge assume
that the person using or installing the system is ignorant,
and therefore should have decisions made for them without
even asking.