Slack and SATA RAID

[vwgtiturbo]

I am in the process of building up another machine, and was considering using two 120Gb SATA drives in a RAID setup. Few questions...

1) Has anyone setup SATA support and/or RAID on Slack 9.1? How much of a bear is it?

2) I plan to have WinXP and Slack on this setup. Will that be a problem? I have never setup a RAID array, so I don't know what it entails, as far as loading two OS's on it...

If it is not possible, then of course I won't be able to do it, but if it is a super pain in the arse, I may not do it either. I format my Win partitions every quarter or so, and am not sure if that would affect my Slack install on a RAID array. If it is too big of a pain, I just don't want to have to deal with it every time I reload. I just can't get away from reloading, I think it has something to do with my anal-retentiveness, and feeling 'better' that everything is clean...

[SkyNet]

RAID was rather difficult for me to get setup on Gentoo, but mainly because of lack of documentation. Once you know what to do though, it's rather easy.

The question I have for you is what type of RAID array do you want? Linear? RAID-0? etc... If you don't know the difference, then I can eloborate for you.

This is Gentoo specific to a degree, but will get you started. Later when I have more time, and after you've answered that question, I'll try to simplify this to you needs.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.p...=software+raid

[vwgtiturbo]

I was looking at RAID 0 (that is the striping, right?). My main concern is how the drives will handle partitioning... Does it work the same as just using a regular hard drive? It is just confusing to me, due to the fact that, when I picture everything spread across two disks, I am unsure if I will still have the same functionality...

[SkyNet]

This should explain the RAID modes to you. Hope it helps. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-5.html

Keep in mind one thing. If one of the HDD's fail in either a Linear or RAID-0 setup, then you have lost the RAID array, and most likely much of your data, while some can be recovered, not everything will be so

I'm not sure about the partitioning. The reason being is that I'm sure you can partition the drives even with RAID, but Win32 isn't just going to startup RAID. So even if you do do it, I'm not sure Win32 will be able to see the partitions.

If you partition then I believe you're going to have to use Linear RAID, because Linear RAID is the only RAID that can be used on different size disks, and since you're going to be making the sizes different by partitioning well.... I believe it can be done like this: use fdisk get everything partitioned, then you can add the Linux partitions/HDDs to your RAID tab. Look below notice that this Linear RAID is only using /dev/hda1, and /dev/hdb2. Well there could also be a partition called /dev/hda2 but that is a Win32 partition or whatever you want so we don't add it to the array.

raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level linear
nr-raid-disks 2
chunk-size 32
persistent-superblock 1
device /dev/hda1
raid-disk 0
device /dev/hdb2
raid-disk 1

[vwgtiturbo]

Interesting... looks like I have a bit of reading to do... I would like to do RAID 0 for the speed, but probably will not due to data loss risk (even though I am pretty good about doing backups three times a week). I just don't want a drive to fail and take out both OSs. At least with one OS on each drive, if one fails, I still have the other...

[SkyNet]

Well with RAID Linear, and 0 if you lose one of the drives, then you're Linux RAID array is toast, that doesn't mean you can't still access the other drive using /dev/hdx still. Also if your Win32 partition happens to be on the drive that isn't lost, then it should still run without any problems, because it never used the array to begin with.

The worst case I can come up with is that the drive with the Win32 is lost. Not only do you lose Win32, but because in Linux you use RAID then you've lost the array, and more then likely the ability to boot up. However not all data will be lost, because the data on the drive that is good is still there. It is just going to be a pain backing up from there, and having to install both OS's again on the remaining drive or installing a new one.

BTW from my understanding, with your specs you could do RAID-0 however because you want to partition sections off, then you'll be making the drives not equal so that only leaves you with Linear. Remember RAID-0, and above must be or should be drives of equal size. Of course I'm thinking totally in software aspects, I don't know if this is simply a hardware limitation, which you have met being the drives physically are the same size.

[kfx]

1) Has anyone setup SATA support and/or RAID on Slack 9.1? How much of a bear is it?

Slack 9.1 would rather eat its own intestines than let anyone install it on SATA hard drives. I bought a shiny new computer and was all like OOOOH TIME FOR SLACK and the $#^@ thing won't discover my drive. I'm an in the process -- literally, the shell is in another window -- of compiling a custom kernel with the 2.4.22-ac4 patch, which has some SATA options in it. My controller is a Silicon Image 3112, which is reputedly supported, but I find such repute to be filthy lies.

Rumor has it Mandrake 10 supports most SATA controllers out of the box, but I refuse to stray from Slack. Well, I /tried/ Gentoo 2004.0 livecd, but it didn't seem to notice the giant freaking hard drive.

Good luck. :-\

[davidwr50]

1) Has anyone setup SATA support and/or RAID on Slack 9.1? How much of a bear is it?

Slack 9.1 would rather eat its own intestines than let anyone install it on SATA hard drives. I bought a shiny new computer and was all like OOOOH TIME FOR SLACK and the $#^@ thing won't discover my drive. I'm an in the process -- literally, the shell is in another window -- of compiling a custom kernel with the 2.4.22-ac4 patch, which has some SATA options in it. My controller is a Silicon Image 3112, which is reputedly supported, but I find such repute to be filthy lies.

Rumor has it Mandrake 10 supports most SATA controllers out of the box, but I refuse to stray from Slack. Well, I /tried/ Gentoo 2004.0 livecd, but it didn't seem to notice the giant freaking hard drive.

Good luck. :-\

I have a Slackware 9.1 setup on ide which works fine. I have just started exploring SATA RAID with the SiI 3112 controller.

AT the boot prompt enter
bare.i ide=reverse

then use DMESG to see if the SATA drives are there - I suspect they will be.

Now if like me you installed WinXP first you are now scratching your head and wondering what to do because cfdisk says:

No Partition table or unknown signature on partition table
Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N]

Yikes! will it wreck my drive you ask? Who knows?

[sujoki]

I would like to get a Sata drive to play around with, I have done raid on a friends machine but i forget how to do it lol, been a long time, i know i found the instructions and stuff on http://www.tldp.org there might also be a sata one on there also.

[kfx]

I have a Slackware 9.1 setup on ide which works fine. I have just started exploring SATA RAID with the SiI 3112 controller.

AT the boot prompt enter
bare.i ide=reverse

then use DMESG to see if the SATA drives are there - I suspect they will be.

Now if like me you installed WinXP first you are now scratching your head and wondering what to do because cfdisk says:

No Partition table or unknown signature on partition table
Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N]

Yikes! *will it wreck my drive you ask? Who knows?

Yeah, it'll wreck your drive. You'll lose your partition table. Here's my issue: I don't have any IDE hard drives at all in my computer. The only reason I even leave the IDE controller on at all is for my DVD drive. A friend of mine gave me an old WD Caviar 20-gig drive so I can run slack again, but frankly, that won't fly with me. Why would I build an A64 and then run a 5400rpm drive? It's senseless.

bare.i ide=reverse is an interesting idea. I still doubt it'll work, but I'll try downloading slack-current tonight and I'll give it a shot.