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Hello!
Is there any Linux distributions that can detect my SATA raid setup and offer a easiy installation on it? Simple as in the normal partition screens that you see in Linux installations (I have installed Ubuntu and Fedora Core 5 before).
I have just built a new computer with two SATA II discs which I configured as a raid0 array with the motherboard's SATA raid bios. The SATA controller is a Intel ICH8.
Then I booted Windows XP, loaded the SATA raid drivers that came with the motherboard, partitioned the raid like this:
25 GB Windows partition
25 GB empty partition (I want to put linux here)
+ a third partition with the remaining disk space
Installation went fine and Windows XP is working great.
Then I tried to install Ubuntu (ubuntu-6.10-desktop-amd64.iso), first to discover the normal install cd didn't support SATA raid controllers, so i downloaded the alternative cd ubuntu-6.10-alternate-amd64.iso which supports "LVM and/or RAID partitioning".
After trying it out and finding out it didnt autodetect the current raid etc, i found this document: http://www.ubuntu-in.org/wiki/SATA_RAID_Howto
It sure looks quite possible to get the setup that I want. But that ammount of configuration scares me alot, since I am not very good at Linux.
Slightly off topic, but I read the other day that Windows Vista supported several SATA raid controllers out of the box.
Any non free Mandriva Linux 2
Any non free Mandriva Linux 2007 does.
Mandriva free may too.
I seem to remember fedora core doing this too.
crazy
I don't know about your compat problem, but you're crazy to set your machine up this way. Your machine has twice the likelyhood of dying as a non-raid0 system, for what will most likely be no noticable benefit.
Most Likely a Fakeraid
Checkout the sections relating to fakeraid here:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
I am almost positive the RAID solution included on your motherboard is nothing more than marketing hyped propreitary software raid, with some nice drivers for windows.
With that said the only way I think this will work "easily" in reguards to getting a dual boot box up and running would be to create two separate software RAID partitions across across your array. IE: one for the BIOS fakeraid and one using Linux's MD software RAID. That said if you are planning to continue to use RAID0 why not just create a single partition on one of the drives outside of the BIOS array?
I know about your setup
I have the ICH8 based motherboard. Kernel support is brand spanking new for that controller. Yes, you have to use the Ubuntu alternate CD to do raid in the setup, but the alternate CD doesn't seem to support ICH8. It seems like it was a last minute patch that only got put into final Live installer, because I couldn't get the beta live or final alternate versions to detect my drives. Lucky I didn't want raid on that computer, so Edgy works fine for me. It sounds like you just want to do software raid, you will have look for howto's on mdadm tool to do that. You can setup a raid 1 partition after everything is installed. This will speed up read performance, at the cost of some write performance, and give redundancy for important data. You could also probally also manually setup a raid 0 partition from the Live CD, though I haven't tried it.
No good support/answer for this common situation
This is an increasingly common system configuration for people running Windows who are thinking about trying Linux. I'm in the same boat. I'd love to install Ubuntu, but I'm certainly not willing to discard my existing Windows XP installation (on my "fakeRAID" RAID-1 array) to do it.
Plus, this configuration is the ONLY way to get Windows XP itself (C:\WINDOWS) installed onto a RAID mirror. XP implements software RAID, but only after XP is installed, and only on drives other than the system drive. The whole point of using RAID-mirroring is so that if a drive dies you don't have to reinstall the entire OS. So software RAID is not a solution for people who want both Windows XP and Linux to reside on the same RAID drive pair and get the benefits of RAID mirroring for both.
The Linux development community really needs to get its act together and start supporting "fakeRAID" better. Windows has no problems with it at all, but Linux completely lacks support. You can go around blaming hardware manufacturers all you want, but in the end, all users care about is whether it works, not complicated technical or political explanations or excuses. Just make it work, painlessly.
With Keith on this one ..
Most current motherboards have this capability of 'hardware assisted software raid', 'fake raid' or whatever you want to call it. Drives are cheap, people buy 2 or more and hook them up this way. I personally like it just for its JBOD capability, not having to worry about running out of space in a particular folder on one of the drives (Raid 0). You don't have to warn me about Raid 0 hazards, I chose it knowingly.
But more importantly, while contemplating for the second time a migration to Linux from Windows XP, I want to be able to read files on my NTFS 'fake raid' Windows partition from my Linux installation to be.
Oddly, it was possible with Mandrake 8 (now Mandriva) a couple of years back for the 'fake raid' controller I was using then, but the support was dropped in later versions.
Not a good policy in my humble opinion.
raid
Drives are cheap, people buy 2 or more and hook them up this way.
Why not grab a 20 GB USB drive to try out Linux then? You will avoid all the partitioning issues.
I love FakeRAID and in the
I love FakeRAID and in the end it doesn't do anything different than software RAID provided by the OS since it uses main CPU and system RAM. FakeRAID is easy to set up and works well. Sure, a real RAID controller is nicer, but costs as much as the entire desktop system.
In regards to RAID0, I was underimpressed, performance is higher, but not high enough to accept half the reliability, and for sure performance is not doubling.
Linux does support software
Linux does support software RAID, but as it's implemented on OS level instead of hardware level (as real RAID) the problem lies in the fact that the "RAID" does not exist before the OS starts. Alas when the bootloader is in charge it can't see the "RAID".
This goes both ways, a Windows installation can't see a Linux SoftRAID either.
OpenSUSE DOES!!!
OpenSUSE DOES!!!