General :: Using GRUB To Boot From An Pci Sata Raid Card?
Mar 18, 2011
I have a DL380 G3 HP server and I need to attach a 1TB hard drive. Of course the server only accepts SCSI and since I don't have a few thousand pounds to splash about I am looking at alternate methods. What I have done so far is buy a PCI SATA raid card and attach the 1TB drive to it. The BIOS seemed to be playing nice detecting it and allowing me to select the card. But it won�t see the drive.
Funnily enough though when I installed Linux on the SCSI drive during the install it saw the 1TB just fine and I could write to it. This has led me to believe that I could use GRUB (installed on the SCSI) to boot the 1TB as the hardware setup is working but the BIOS just can't handle it. So here I am with no real knowledge of GRUB. I was hoping someone could tell me where to begin with this and if it is even possible
View 3 Replies
ADVERTISEMENT
Feb 15, 2011
My "Home" server is getting ful, I've got one 1tera-disk and now I wan't to secure all data with raid 5 config. Can someone recommend a good "fairly"-cheap RAID5 SATA card?
View 1 Replies
View Related
Aug 20, 2011
I have a Asus P5Q-E with SATA Raid (fake Raid ?) with 2 250Gb disks on Raid 0 and have Windows 7 installed. Freed some space and want to install Ubuntu 11.04 alongside Win7. Install choosing the "alongside" option. Installed...reboot...grub rescue (error no such device). Win7 disk recovery and got access to Win7 again. Where is Ubuntu ? Nowhere... the free space continues free (not partitioned) and found no evidence of ubuntu install. Ok...second try with "something else" option, created /boot /swap and / partitions and installed grub on /boot partition (this time I want to use windows boot to choose...and if it fails the instalation again, at least I got Windows). Installed...reboot...grub rescue.
Again, the free space wasn't partitioned and the installer spend some time doing something but there is no evidence of ubuntu install. Also grub seems to be installed on first disk (even when I choose /boot as device bootloader installation) - I've used EasyBCD to create an entry on win bootloader and when I choose that got grub> (not grub rescue>).
Can Ubuntu be installed on such conditions ?
View 1 Replies
View Related
Sep 29, 2010
Ive created two RAID0 partitions on my drives, a 500GB and a 60GB. Im trying to install Ubuntu on the smaller partition (ive already put Win 7 on the larger one) and every time when i get right to the last part of installation it says Grub couldnt be installed. "the grub package failed to install in arget......."
View 1 Replies
View Related
Sep 17, 2010
I have a mac G4 Gigabit Ethernet, with 400MHz processor. I was running the Hardy version of Ubuntu Server last year, although I was booting from the onboard ATA controller. I just added a 2-port Sonnet SATA card and a single 250G SATA drive, and removed all the ATA gear. I installed 10.04 Server, and via guided partitioning wiped the 250G SATA drive, and installed yaboot. When I try to boot from the 250G SATA it hangs up at the "Mac Smiley <-> ?" Icon after the second stage bootstrap prompt, and then cycles.
I looked at some other threads, in fact read this about 4 times and got some good hints: [URL]. I can boot with a live 10.04 desktop CD, and mount the linux partition and look at yaboot.conf:
Code:
fdisk -l
/dev/sda
# type name length base ( size ) system
/dev/sda1 Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1 ( 31.5k) Partition map
/dev/sda2 Apple_Bootstrap untitled 2048 @ 2048 ( 1.0M) NewWorld
bootblock .....
Then I did:
Code:
sudo mkdir /mnt/linux
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/linux .....
I also tried to get some details on my PCI SATA card via "lspci". How to get this to boot? I haven't quite given up on this older G4 box. It will make a great SSH server and home automation box if I can just smoove out this wrinkle.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Feb 23, 2010
I have an unbranded netbook (N270, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, no disk drive). This netbook had a strange, unusable Linux installation, which did not allow any possibility to modify anything on the machine. I could not even use F2 to get into the BIOS. F2 was the only key I could use to get a boot device option. I wanted to wipe off that Linux installation and install Windows 7 (reading some instruction from the net, using USB drive or SD card). I have done a similar installation on another netbook and it worked OK. On this machine though, I could only see "GRUB" when I tried to boot using USB or SD card. Later, I used UNetBootIn on SD card to load Ubuntu LiveCD.
This time it worked and I though of installing Ubuntu on this machine instead of Windows7. I chose to use the entire HDD, thereby, wiping the old original Linux installation. The installation went well and I wanted to start Ubuntu from the HDD. But it only ended up in a "C" with a blinking cursor. Laterwhen I tried to boot from the same UNetBootIn SD card, all I get is a "GRUB" with nothing else. The same happens when I try to boot from the USB drive with the Windows 7. I am left with no bootable OS on the netbook, no way to get into the BIOS, no possibility to boot from USB or SD card.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Mar 23, 2009
I changed something in the BIOS which causes a kernel panic, if my card is installed (Ultra ATA/133 PCI-to-ATA Host Controller). I had it working fine til a month ago, when I installed some Linux on a HD on that card. That booted fine too, and I did some disk switching. Still all was well, but yesterday I tried to boot XP (2nd IDE master)(GRUB is Ubuntu/2nd IDE slave), and XP wouldn't load. I clicked here, and clicked there, and now XP and Ubuntu boot, ONLY if the RAIDbus card is Out. Put the card in, and I get a kernel panic/lockup. This HAS to be a BIOS function - nothing is different on the disks, including GRUB menu.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jan 12, 2010
I'm a long time windows user and it-tech but I have long felt that my geek-levels were too low so I installed Ubuntu last week (9.10 x64). Hopefully I can make it my primary OS. I have two 80GB drives in RAID-1 from my nforce raid controller, nforce 570 chipset. Then a 320 GB drive where I placed ubuntu and it's also where grub placed itself. And also a 1TB drive.
When grub tries to boot XP I get the error message: "error: invalid signature" I checked the forum as much as I could and tried a few things, but no change.
Drives sdc and sdd are the two drives in raid, they are matched exactly, but detected as different here. I really think they should be seen as one drive.
how I can make grub work as it should?
Also, if/when I need to make changes to grub, do I really have to use the live CD?
Code:
============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================
=> Grub 1.97 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive
in partition #1 for /boot/grub.
=> Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb
=> Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc
[Code].....
View 2 Replies
View Related
Mar 20, 2011
There have been many postings on doing Raid 0 setups, and it seems the best way looks like softRaid, but there were some arguments for fakeRaid in dual boot situations. I've seen some posts on dual boot windows/linux in Raid 0, but I was hoping to do a multi-boot using a grub partition, with several Linux distros and Windows 7. There will also be a storage disk for data, but not in the array. From what I gather, I'll need a grub partition which can only reside on one of the two disks, one swap partition on each disk, then the rest I can stripe.
I've got two 73GB WD raptor drives to use for the OS's and programs. I'm just getting my feet wet with the terminal in linux (Ubuntu makes it way too easy to stay in GUI), and the inner workings of the OS, so I have several questions:
Is this going to be worth the effort? Obviously I'm trying to boost performance in boot and run times, but with Grub on a single drive, will I see much gain?
Does this sound like the right methodology (softRAID)? I only have two spare PCI slot's, which don't seem like they would be condusive to hardware raid, but someone who knows more could convince me otherwise.
[Code]...
View 5 Replies
View Related
Mar 19, 2011
I am trying to install Ubuntu Server 10.10 on a computer with 5x 1.5 TB HDDs. I went through the process of partitioning the five hard drives into three partitions each:
sd*0 is a 300MB partition for /boot, RAID1, 2 active, 3 spare
sd*1 is a 500MB partition for swap, RAID1, 2 active, 3 spare
sd*2 is a 1.5TB partition for /, RAID5+LVM, 5 active, 0 spare.
md0 is the raid1 on sd*0
md1 is the raid1 on sd*1
md2 is the raid2 on sd*2
During the install, everything seemed to work fine with the formatter, but the installation ended in error. I booted into rescue mode and found that though all the drives were U (in /proc/mdstat), it was resyncing. I let this run (overnight) and the next day, jumped back in and installed the OS successfully.
However, after installing GRUB, when the installation process asked me to reboot, the system came back up with a blank screen (blank, save for a blinking cursor) and didn't move from there. I am thinking that the problem is GRUB, since I can boot into the main LVM partition via the rescue option on the install cd. Here's what bugs me:
[Code]....
View 9 Replies
View Related
Sep 19, 2014
I am running a 14 disk RAID 6 on mdadm behind 2 LSI SAS2008's in JBOD mode (no HW raid) on Debian 7 in BIOS legacy mode.
Grub2 is dropping to a rescue shell complaining that "no such device" exists for "mduuid/b1c40379914e5d18dddb893b4dc5a28f".
Output from mdadm:
Code: Select all  # mdadm -D /dev/md0
  /dev/md0:
      Version : 1.2
   Creation Time : Wed Nov 7 17:06:02 2012
     Raid Level : raid6
     Array Size : 35160446976 (33531.62 GiB 36004.30 GB)
   Used Dev Size : 2930037248 (2794.30 GiB 3000.36 GB)
    Raid Devices : 14
[Code] ....
Output from blkid:
Code: Select all  # blkid
  /dev/md0: UUID="2c61b08d-cb1f-4c2c-8ce0-eaea15af32fb" TYPE="xfs"
  /dev/md/0: UUID="2c61b08d-cb1f-4c2c-8ce0-eaea15af32fb" TYPE="xfs"
  /dev/sdd2: UUID="b1c40379-914e-5d18-dddb-893b4dc5a28f" UUID_SUB="09a00673-c9c1-dc15-b792-f0226016a8a6" LABEL="media:0" TYPE="linux_raid_member"
[Code] ....
The UUID for md0 is `2c61b08d-cb1f-4c2c-8ce0-eaea15af32fb` so I do not understand why grub insists on looking for `b1c40379914e5d18dddb893b4dc5a28f`.
**Here is the output from `bootinfoscript` 0.61. This contains alot of detailed information, and I couldn't find anything wrong with any of it: [URL] .....
During the grub rescue an `ls` shows the member disks and also shows `(md/0)` but if I try an `ls (md/0)` I get an unknown disk error. Trying an `ls` on any member device results in unknown filesystem. The filesystem on the md0 is XFS, and I assume the unknown filesystem is normal if its trying to read an individual disk instead of md0.
I have come close to losing my mind over this, I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling grub numerous times, `update-initramfs -u -k all` numerous times, `update-grub` numerous times, `grub-install` numerous times to all member disks without error, etc.
I even tried manually editing `grub.cfg` to replace all instances of `mduuid/b1c40379914e5d18dddb893b4dc5a28f` with `(md/0)` and then re-install grub, but the exact same error of no such device mduuid/b1c40379914e5d18dddb893b4dc5a28f still happened.
[URL] ....
One thing I noticed is it is only showing half the disks. I am not sure if this matters or is important or not, but one theory would be because there are two LSI cards physically in the machine.
This last screenshot was shown after I specifically altered grub.cfg to replace all instances of `mduuid/b1c40379914e5d18dddb893b4dc5a28f` with `mduuid/2c61b08d-cb1f-4c2c-8ce0-eaea15af32fb` and then re-ran grub-install on all member drives. Where it is getting this old b1c* address I have no clue.
I even tried installing a SATA drive on /dev/sda, outside of the array, and installing grub on it and booting from it. Still, same identical error.
View 14 Replies
View Related
Sep 13, 2010
I'm having serious troubles to install ubuntu-10.04.1. My raid is an hardware raid with intel chipset. Note that win7 is already installed and working with my raid. I made some space from windows, to install Ubuntu (40gb). First, I run the installer, everything seems to be fine. I choose to install Ubuntu were there is the most space free (sorry, I'm not sure about the real terms used there).
Then my partition with the vista loader appears. So the installer can see my raid, and should work fine (everything is detected correctly). But once I'm in the end of the installation (around 95%), a pop-up appears, and tells me that Grub can't install in /dev/sda and it's a fatal error. I can choose an another destination, but it doesn't seems to work.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Mar 12, 2010
I had ubu 904 and vista installed on an 80gb drive, i had a spare 80gb drive also. I setup a raid0 config in my bios, then installed ubu9.10 onto it. All was fine until the very end, and then it said grub failed to install.
So i rebooted, and im left with a blinking cursor. How do i install grub? Ive installed ubu a few times now and never had an issue so now im lost.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Mar 22, 2011
How long does hardware Raid card (raid 1, 2 drives)take to mirror a 1 TB drive (500gb used)?Is there a general rule of thumb for this?4 hours? 12 hours? 24 hours?
View 1 Replies
View Related
May 28, 2011
I've recently had trouble reinstalling my Ubuntu system as I was getting various unusual errors as described in my old thread here. I thought it was probably something to do with my RAID-0 array which was pre-installed on my laptop from purchase being corrupted or something like that (if it's possible). I decided to simplify things for myself (not understanding RAID arrays much) so I just removed the RAID array and installed Windows and Ubuntu on the now separate hard disks. It worked fine.
I noticed quite a significant performance drop, however, with even Ubuntu boots taking longer than 30 seconds despite my laptop being both high-spec and only a few months old. Windows, as you can imagine, was dreadfully slow. I wasn't entirely convinced that this was entirely due to the loss of the RAID array - as even low-spec laptops with presumably no RAID arrays are supposed to boot Ubuntu in under 30 seconds apparently - but I read that RAID-0 arra
View 8 Replies
View Related
Jul 5, 2011
Have Lian Li Ex 503 External Raid System, using 4x2TB, using Raidmode 10 for good performance [ Just for those who are interested: http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/pr ... ex=115&g=f ]
[Code]...
But using e-sata my transfer rates are very low (from internal drive to external ex503), around 60-70mb/sec
But hdparm tells me:
[Code]...
View 3 Replies
View Related
Mar 19, 2009
I'm working on a new server and it has an Nvidia SATA array controller with 2 250Gb SATA drives configured in a hardware array. When the first screen comes up I'm entering the option Linux DD for it to prompt me for the drivers but nothing ever happens. The screen says that it's loading a SATA driver for about 15 minutes and then the screen clears and has a plus sign cursor on a black screen. What am I doing wrong? The only driver that came with the HP server are for Redhat 4 and 5 and SUSE, will any of those actually work?
View 7 Replies
View Related
Sep 9, 2010
I went to install Ubuntu 10.04 on my home pc last night but I couldn't. The installers could not see my raid and even though I wished to install to a seperate HDD windows is installed to my raid. The windows MBR always overtook the Grub and whenever I start grub up it cannot find an OS or Kernel.
I have got an ASUS Rampage 3 Extreme [URL] and on it there are two 6.0 sata Marvell connectors: [URL]
In these two Marvell connectors are two WD velociraptor 10,00 rpm Raid 0 drives. On these two drives is installed Windows 7. The ubuntu installer cannot seem to see the raid pair and so does not install Grub correctly.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Jul 18, 2011
I have a raid5 on 10 disk, 750gb and it have worked fine with grub for a long time with ubuntu 10.04 lts. A couple of days ago I added a disk to the raid, growd it and then resized it.. BUT, I started the resize-process on a terminal on another computer, and after some time my girlfriend powered down that computer!
So the resize process cancelled in the middle and i couldn't acess any of the HDDs so I rebooted the server.
Now the problem, the system is not booting up, simple black with a blinking line. Used a rescue CD to boot it up, finised the resize-process and the raid seems to be working fine so I tried to boot normal again. Same problem. Rescue cd, updated grub, got several errors: error: unsupported RAID version: 0.91. I have tried to purge grub, grub-pc, grub commmon, removed /boot/grub and installed grub again. Same problem.
I have tried to erased mbr (# dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdX bs=446 count=1) on sda (ide disk, system), sdb (sata, new raid disk). Same problem. Removed and reinstalled ubuntu 11.04 and is now getting error: no such device: (hdd id). Again tried to reinstall grub on both sda and sdb, no luck. update-grub is still generating error about raid id 0.91 and is back on a blinking line on normal boot. When you'r resizeing a raid MDADM changed the ID from 0.90 to 0.91 to prevent something that happend happened. But since I have completed the resize-process MDADM have indeed changed the ID back to 0.90 on all disks.
I have also tried to follow a howto on a similar problem with a patch on [URL] But I cant compile, various error about dpkg. So my problem is, I cant get grub to work. It just gives me a blinking line and unsupported RAID version: 0.91.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Nov 9, 2010
I've installed debian squeezy recently and for some reason I have problems with mounting /home partition during startup.
There's an error:Mounting local filesystems...mount: special device /dev/mapper/isw_bbfedcffgi_Volume0p6 does not exist. failed
I've tried using fsck - no result the file system is healthy, I've tried formatting it once again (fresh copy, no user data) and it's not working. What is more mounting the partition manually goes well - I can read the data and write to it. All other partitions are ok.
I have no idea what's going on and why mounting /home fails. I've written this post on Polish debian users forum, but no response - only to give more info, so I'll put it here also:
ls -al /dev/mapper
crw------- 1 root root 10, 59 Nov 9 19:34 control
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 9 19:34 isw_bbfedcffgi_Volume0 -> ../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 9 19:34 isw_bbfedcffgi_Volume01 -> ../dm-2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 9 19:34 isw_bbfedcffgi_Volume05 -> ../dm-3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 9 19:34 isw_bbfedcffgi_Volume06 -> ../dm-4
code....
View 2 Replies
View Related
Oct 13, 2010
I received some errors while running a benchmarking script to determine my ideal raid chunk size. There are several errors in the kernel log regarding the sata link and eventually the two drives i have connected to a pci express x1 sata card were no longer present in /dev/
the script i was using is available here [URL]..system specs 1 500gb western digital drive (system drive)3 2tb samsung f4 drives (2 connected to pci x1 card (sata II) and 1 onto onboard sata port (sata I)) single core amd 64 on SiS chipset debian 64bit testing
[Code]...
I rebooted the machine and everything appears to be happy. What do these errors mean? What steps should i take to prevent them in the future so it doesn't end up corrupting the array?
View 1 Replies
View Related
Apr 19, 2009
Am installing Fedora 10 on an old but good server that used to be a windows box. It has 2 sata disk raid level 1 on adaptec 2410SA card. Disks are clean no info even did a low level format and recreated RAID.. twice DVD boots and installs os on raid array and reports success. new volume appears under computer icon but cannot be mounted after reboot attempt reports Reading physical volumes. This may take a while... (it doesn't)
Volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to acces resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /ysroot as ext3: No such file or directory
input: PS/2 Generic Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input4
and then a blinking cursor with keyboard echo but its just copying reboot with install DVD does not show previous (unmountable) disk image and repeat of above process increases operator need for alcohol have "disable write cache for drives" as I found that is a post but after fedora install.I do not know what grub is for instance but once linux is booted (on other computers) I can muddle through ok in terminal mode.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Sep 17, 2010
I have a Dell Studio XPS running openSUSE 11.2 with dual mirrored disks (using Dell's SATA controller). Does anyone know how I can set up automatic monitoring of the disks so that I will be informed if either fail? I think smartd might be what I need here. Is that correct? I added:
/dev/sda -a -d sat -m <my email>
/dev/sda -a -d sat -m <my email>
smartd is running, but how do I know that it will report what I need? I also have a client with a Dell PowderEdge SC440 with SAS 5/iR also running openSUSE 11.2. They also require automatic monitoring. There doesn't seem to be a SAS directive for smartd. I notice that the newer release says it does support SAS disk. I upgraded to 5.39. On restart (with DEVICESCAN as the directive) I get the following in /var/log/messages for my SAS RAID disk.
Sep 18 10:47:26 harmony-server smartd[25234]: Device: /dev/sdb, Bad IEC (SMART) mode page, err=4, skip device
I ran:
smartctl -a /dev/sdb
and got the result:
smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, smartmontools
Device: Dell VIRTUAL DISK Version: 1028
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Sat Sep 18 11:32:08 2010 JST
Device does not support SMART
Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging
Is there some other tool/package that does support DELL virtual disks?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Dec 3, 2010
I have 4 SATA's in a RAID 5 array using mdadm. Yesterday when I started the computer the RAID did not build/mount. When trying to load the array manually I get the message "mdadm: cannot open device /dev/sd(a,b,c,d)1: Device or resource busy" The drives should not be mounted or in use. The output of the drives in mdadm (mdadm --examine /dev/sd_1) looks normal.
The weirdest part is that rebooting often changes which drive is marked as busy, it can be any of the 4 SATA drives. how to figure out why/what is being used and how to disable it? I have tried searching for similar threads here and in google and haven't found anything similar or that worked.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Jan 7, 2011
I have three 640GB sata hard drives that I would like to put into a raid 5 configuration. I would like to opt for a software raid 5 so its hardware independent. I was trying to follow these instructions, but they seem a bit dated.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Dec 3, 2010
I have 4 SATA's in a RAID 5 array using mdadm. Yesterday when I started the computer the RAID did not build/mount.
When trying to load the array manually I get the message "mdadm: cannot open device /dev/sd(a,b,c,d)1: Device or resource busy" The drives should not be mounted or in use.
The output of the affected drive in mdadm (mdadm --examine /dev/sd_1) looks normal.
The weirdest part is that rebooting often changes which drive is marked as busy, it can be any of the 4 SATA drives. What is being used and how to disable it?
View 9 Replies
View Related
Jun 12, 2010
I bought a used server and it's in great working condition, but I've got a 2-part problem with the onboard raid controller. I don't have or use RAID and want to figure out how to stop or work around the onboard SATA raid controller. First some motherboard specs.: Arima HDAMA 40-CMO120-A800 [URL]... The 4-port integrated Serial ATA Integrated SiliconImage Sil3114 raid controller is the problem.
Problem 1: When I plug in my SATA server hard drive loaded with Slackware 12.2 and linux kernel 2.6.30.4, the onboard raid controller recognizes the one drive and allows the OS to boot. Slackware gets stuck looking for a raid array and stops at this point -........
View 11 Replies
View Related
Aug 17, 2010
I have a SSD Harddisk with both an usb and Sata connection, and I want to be able to boot both from usb and sata but I can't make it work. When the disk is connected with sata anything works fine but when I connect it with usb instead, Fedora seems to boot but then it gives me an "No root device found" error and just sleep forever. This happens even if I install fedora 13 while the disk is connected with usb. I am running Fedora Core 13. I changed my fstab to
/dev/sda2 / ext4 defaults 1 1
And the disk is still booting when connected to the sata controller. So far so good. But if I boot from the usb connection, it still give me the same "No root device found" message. Even more odd is it that if I boot my fedora core 13 dvd, and choose "rescue installed system" it can't detect the harddisk when connected to usb. And there is no /dev/sd* or anything similarly which could look like a blockdevice. Did redhat forget to include usb drivers in their rescue image for Fedora core? I just tried the disk on an other system, with exactly the same problems.
I have now added the LABEL=myroot line to fstab(I guess it have to be uppercase to work) and the harddisk still boot fine when using sata, but it still can't boot using usb. I begin to guess that redhat forgot some usb drivers In fedora Core 13, because the system can't see the harddisk when booting the dvd and entering rescue mode. blkid don't show any harddisks at all and there are no block devices in /dev/ which might be my usb disk. Is it possible to find the uuid of partitions if id add the usb harddisk to a windows computer, and more important: will this be the same uuid as linux will se.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Mar 12, 2010
I've recently started having an issue with an mdadm RAID 6 array that been operational for about 2500 hours.
Intermittently during write operations the array stalls, dropping to almost 0 write speed for 10-30 seconds. When this occur one or both of the 2 drives attached to a 2 port Silicon Image si3132 SATA-II controller "locks up" with its activity light locked on. This just started occurring within the last week and didn't seem to coincide with any update that i noticed. The array has just recently passed 12.5% full. The size of the write does not seem to make any difference and it seems completely random. Some times copying a 5 GB dataset results in no slow down other times a torrent downloading to the array at 50kb/sec does cause a slow down and vise versa.
The array consists of 8 WD 1.5TB drives, 6 attached to the ICH9R south bridge, and 2 attached to a si3132 based PCI express card. The array is formatted as a single ext4 partition.
Checking SMART data for all drives shows no errors. Testing read speed with hdparm reports what i would expect (100mb/sec for each drive, ~425mb/sec for the array).
The only thing i did notice is that udma6 is enabled for all the ICH9R drives while only udma5 is enabled for the si3132 drives. Write cache is enabled for all the disks. Attempting to set the si3132 drive to udma6 results in an IO error from hdparm.
The si3132 drive is using the sata_sil24 driver. Nothing of interest appears in the kern or syslog. During this time top shows very high wait time.
The s13132 controller appears to have the original firmware from 2006 loaded, there are some firmware updates available on the Silicon Image website for this controller that now appear to offer separate firmwares for RAID operation (some sort of hybrid controller/software thing the controller supports) and a separate firmware for standard IDE use.
Has anyone had similar issues with this controller? Is a firmware update a reasonable course of action? If so which firmware is best supported by the linux driver?
I know i'm not using its raid features but i've dealt with controllers that needed to be in raid mode for ahci to be active and for linux to work well with them. I'm bit ify at the idea of just trying it and finding out as it could knock 2 disks of my array out of action.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Dec 30, 2010
I'm trying to install a box with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server with a typical LAMP system in order to replace my old Ubuntu 8.04 server I have at my school to have a "backup" system and also trying to replace NIS authentication with LDAP. Well I'm getting stuck on the first step: installation of base system.
I want to build a RAID-1 system with the two 320GB SATA HD's the machine has, I have a little experience in installing RAID because I installed my old 8.04 server with RAID-1 aswell.
I boot my box from an USB stick with Ubuntu 10.04 Server 64bit, the systems boots well, asks me about language, keyboard and so, finds the two NIC cards and the DHCP configuration of one of the card is done. Then it starts the partitioner.
One of the HD's already contains three partitions with an installation of a regional flavour of Ubuntu, the other HD only contains a partition for backups, I don't want to preserve all this stuff, so the first thing I do is to replace the partiton tables of both HD's with a new one. This is done without problems.
Then I go to the first disk, by example, and create a new partition, the partitioner ask me for the size, I write 0.5 GB (or 500 MB), then I select that it has to be a Primary partition at the beginning of the disk, all goes OK. Once created I go to the "Use as: " line, type Enter and select the option "Partition for RAID volume", when I hit Enter the error appears: the screen flickers in black for a second or two, then it shows a progress bar "Starting the partitioner..." THAT ALWAYS GET STUCK AT 47%!!!
Sometimes the partitioner allows me progress a little further (for ex. lets me activate the boot bit of the partition, or it allows me to make another partiton, even once the error didn't appeared until the first partiton of the second HD!!) but it always get stuck with the same progress bar at the 47%.
I've tried a lot of things: I downloaded again the ISO and rebuilt the USB, same result. Downloaded the ISO and rebuilt the USB from another computer, same result. Unplugged all the SATA and IDE drives except the two HD's, same result. Built a CD-ROM instead of an USB, same result. Downloaded the 10.10 server ISO (not an LTS), and the USB stick can't boot, is another error, but only to try.
[Code]...
View 1 Replies
View Related
