Suggestions for new hard drive partitions

[xboxboy]

Quick update guys.

 

I've had enough of the messing around trying to boot off the raid array, so I purchased another hard disk, sata, to run off the marvell controller as a boot disk and have the raid array as purely data....

 

Great idea in theory, not so great in practice...still getting windows BSOD upon reboot....

 

Why is this so hard????? Im sure when its figured it will be great, but I'm going mental here. lol..

[xboxboy]

Tried to install mandy 2008.1, with the raid drives disconnected. Cannot load X now...I never got mandy to boot before. It boots, but no x windows.

 

My motherboard doesn't have on board video, so I'm guessing I have a video glitch. It is a nvidia Asus EN9400GT silent. Should have been fine for what I want to do. What am I missing here???

[xboxboy]

Ran XFdrake from command line, have now got x up and running. Used the nv driver.

 

Am attempting to add nvidia driver...

[xboxboy]

Still having dramas here.

 

Here is the a link to the mother board manual if some one would like to help.

http://support.asus.com/download/download....model=P5Q%20PRO

 

I've searched plenty of forums out there, and this seems to cause lots of issues for people.

 

I now have 3 hard drives. One 500gb that I would like to boot from, xp and mandy, plus trial distros.

2 640 gb drives that I want to set in RAID1 through the ICH10R controller....The silicon image controller needs windows to run, so is no good for linux as well....

 

I almost think I've got a setting in BIOS somewhere that I'm just not setting right..

 

It's definately a driver issue, so whether I need to turn off the silicon image controller and all accessories on the board and start from scratch, or I just genuinely have a hardware glitch I don't really know.

 

Any help most apreciated.

[xboxboy]

Well its up and running, and didn't it take some doing/

 

From looking all over the web lots and lots of people are having trouble. But luckily I found a solution on the Asus forums.

 

Turn raid off in BIOS. Hook a hard drive to the E_SATA1 port, and do a windows install.....Now this is not supported, but it works.

 

So I had a working SP3 on E_SATA1. Shutdown pc, turn raid on in BIOS and reboot. Windows loaded and found new hardware, wants to install driver, so install the raid driver.

 

Shutdown pc. Added the two raid drives, rebooted, enter the intel matrix Rom, set the array up and reboot. Enter Bios to ensure booting of E_SATA1 hard disk still. Reboot. Windows is up and running with a raid1 data array.

 

I shutdown and moved the boot drive from E_SATA1, back onto the intel ich10r controller, entered bios, set the boot disk. Reboot pc. All is working.

 

The driver I gave to windows when it wanted the raid driver was the same floppy I had been f6 adding to install, but it would just not work......

 

So know I got windows and mandy on a boot drive, with plenty of room for messing with other distros.

And two hard drives in raid1, being purely data drives. I'm going to move my docs off the windows partition and onto the data raid array, and the same with the /home folder.

 

Exactly what I wanted. Yay....It only took nearly 1 month, obviously intel, marvell, ASUS or MS have a driver glitch somewhere, hopefully I wont need to go through this again, or updated drivers will behave better.

 

Now I just gotta get X windows up on mandy, I get dropped to a text login, and XFdrake doesn't sort it out.......

[xboxboy]

Ok so I now have 2008.1 up and running, with the Nvidia driver loaded as well. The Lan is running perfectly.

 

Below are screen shots of the hard disk manager. How can I make it so I can access my raid array (mapper/isw_bebgibagai_cleggett08)? If possible I would like to have that in storage media.

 

Can anyone advise me what device sdd is??? I dont know where this comes from!

 

And sdc has a 49gb windows partition, 8gb swap and 49gb of mandy install.

 

Thanks all

[xboxboy]

Is it simply a matter of mounting this drive somehow?

[ianw1974]

I've never seen raid arrays get configured under /dev/mapper. That's normally used for lvm volumes, and they aren't raid unless the lvm was set up inside the raid array. What we could do with is some more info from the console:

 

fdisk -l

 

lvs

 

vgs

 

cat /proc/mdstat

 

cat /etc/mdadm.conf

 

cat /etc/fstab

 

and post results here for all those commands.

[xboxboy]

[root@localhost matthew]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf6ce6f14

  Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *		   1	   77825   625129281	7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf6ce6f14

  Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *		   1	   77825   625129281	7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc9fdc9fd

  Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *		   1		6457	51865821	7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc2			6458	   13886	59673442+   5  Extended
/dev/sdc5			6458		7476	 8185086   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc6			7477	   13886	51488293+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/dm-0: 640.1 GB, 640132714496 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf6ce6f14

 Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/dm-0p1   *		   1	   77825   625129281	7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/dm-1: 640.1 GB, 640132383744 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77824 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x69205244

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

 Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/dm-1p1   ?	   13578	  119522   850995205   72  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-1p2   ?	   45382	   79243   271987362   74  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-1p3   ?	   10499	   10499		   0   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-1p4		  167628	  167631	   25817+   0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order
[root@localhost matthew]#

 

[root@localhost matthew]# 1vs
bash: 1vs: command not found

 

[root@localhost matthew]# vgs
bash: vgs: command not found

 

[root@localhost matthew]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities :
unused devices: <none>
[root@localhost matthew]#

 

[root@localhost matthew]# cat /etc/mdadm.conf
cat: /etc/mdadm.conf: No such file or directory

 

[root@localhost matthew]# cat /etc/fstab
# Entry for /dev/sdc6 :
UUID=8d98e80f-5ff9-4d31-8f99-22eacfead24e / ext3 relatime 1 1
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,exec,flush 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sdc1 :
UUID=867893F17893DDED /mnt/windows ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sdc5 :
UUID=aa3e9216-97b8-4828-a615-a6c962afe02b swap swap defaults 0 0
[root@localhost matthew]#

 

 

Thanks for your help Ian. Some of those commands didn't appear to be applicable to mine install????

 

Im running 2008.1, is the NTFS read/write support safe to use for data storage? or am I better installing the ext3 driver for windows?

[ianw1974]

Yeah, it's not using mdadm but dmraid by the looks of things which is why they didn't work. Also the LVM commands lvs/vgs didn't work because LVM isn't being used as I thought. The devicemapper is probably being used for dmraid, which I've not used so that's why I assumed LVM.

 

However, there's no /dev/sdd anyway, only three hard disks sda, sdb and sdc. sdd was probably when you had a usb stick attached or something, since the size suggests 1GB. At least from the screenshot you showed in a previous post.

 

What I don't understand is what you mean by accessing your array in media, since the system is mounted, and it's working fine. This provides your whole file structure from / and will never be under /media. You will find this under Computers in Gnome, and you can access the partitions from there or going into the main partition to see the full structure as shown under /.

[ianw1974]

Disk /dev/dm-0: 640.1 GB, 640132714496 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf6ce6f14

 Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/dm-0p1   *		   1	   77825   625129281	7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/dm-1: 640.1 GB, 640132383744 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77824 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x69205244

 Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/dm-1p1   ?	   13578	  119522   850995205   72  Unknown
/dev/dm-1p2   ?	   45382	   79243   271987362   74  Unknown
/dev/dm-1p3   ?	   10499	   10499		   0   65  Novell Netware 386
/dev/dm-1p4		  167628	  167631	   25817+   0  Empty

 

you want to be creating mount points for each of the partitions that are a part of the array. I don't know what's in /dev/mapper, but provide output of:

 

ls -l /dev/mapper/

 

so that we can see. However, even with that, I expect that /dev/dm-0 and /dev/dm-1 are the disks that are a part of the array, and as such you should be addressing these in your /etc/fstab so that they're automatically mounted at boot. As you see from the info I copied from your post, under each dm-0 and dm-1 disks, are partitions which you need to use to mount in /etc/fstab.

[xboxboy]

Thanks once again Ian.

 

[matthew@localhost ~]$ ls -l /dev/mapper/
total 0
crw-rw---- 1 root root  10, 62 2008-12-11 06:38 control
brw------- 1 root root 252,  0 2008-12-11 06:38 isw_bebgibagai_Cleggett08
brw------- 1 root root 252,  1 2008-12-11 06:38 isw_bebgibagai_Cleggett08p1
[matthew@localhost ~]$

 

Yes, both of those are 640gb which are used in the array.....I have 2 X 640gb running in raid1 (mirror)

 

Thanks,

[xboxboy]

I forgot to mention, there should be no partition on the array, as I am yet to put data on it. If there are partitions already there (I cant understand why dm1 has partitions) they may be fragments from when I tried booting off the array.

[ianw1974]

Well, one looks like it has an NTFS partition, and the other has some unknown and a Novell NetWare partition. So something either was on the disks before and got picked up. Either way, you can delete these and start again if there is no data there.

 

So you are saying that the 2 x 640GB disks are part of the array? The two above are not two different arrays of 640GB? If so, that means they are two 640GB disks separate from the array, and so you'd be addressing them via the /dev/mapper/isw_bebgibagai_Cleggett08 for the hard disk, and the one with p1 on the end is the one single partition created. At a guess.....

[xboxboy]

Yes Ian you're correct. I have three actual physical drives:

 

1X500gb boot disk

2X640gb drives connected through the intel ich10r controller in raid 1 formation.

 

Im still confused. In windows I have the array as drive d. One identity for the array. Windows doesn't see two disks. (I can view the separate disks through the intel software)

 

Am I able to have one identity for the array, where if I save a file to the array, the ich10r controller takes care of the duplication across the two drives?