Topic: RAID Array

[Matt Q]

Hi,

I hope someone may be able to help, I haven't managed to find anything on a search.

It looks as though my RAID setup is somehow wrong, and as a result the server is not using around 10GB of space. I have three 17GB drives, and my setup now is:

sda (sda1, sda2, sda5)
sdb (sdb1)
sdc (sdc1, sdc2 ,sdc5, sdc6)

md0 = sdc5, sdc1
md1 = sdc6, sda5
md2 = sdb1, sda1

It looks like for whatever reason I am not getting sda2 or sdc2 in any of the arrays. I'm not sure whether this is an issue with my RAID controller? Or a setting in Linux? Anyway I don't have a clue how to fix this, if anyone has any ideas they'd be much appreciated!!

Thanks
Matt

[Paul]

Matt,

You mention a raid controller however, sme has set up a software raid.

By default, sme can set up a software raid1 on 2 disks.  If you want to use the controller card and have a hardware raid then you will have to load drivers during the install process.

Without the drivers, linux recognises the disks as seperate disks even if they are attached to a raid card.

With drivers, Linux treats the 3 drives as one and you install as if there was only 1 drive.  If you have the correct drivers and pick "install as raid" during installation then you will have a hardware raid and a software raid trying to run at the same time.  The results will be unpredictable at best.

Are all 3 disks identical?

What brand and model is the raid card?

What type of raid do you wish to run (raid 0, raid 1, raid 5, etc)?

Tell us what you were expecting to happen.

[Matt Q]

Hi Paul,

All three drives are the same, they are all 17.8 GB Maxtor drives. I'm not sure what RAID card it has in it, it's quite an old Compaq PL1200 server, so I am trying to poke my way around the Compaq website, and see what I can see.

I think when I set SME up, I went for the software RAID option on RAID1, as it is recognising each drive seperately, then configuring them into an array, but seems to be missing out two of the "partitions". I'm quite new to all this RAID business, so may well be talking garbage.

I'm OK for the moment however, as we are only a small company, and chances are we will never actually need the "unallocated" 10GB, I was just curious really!

Thanks!
Matt

[dave]

Hi Matt,

I'm not running a proliant box but I do have a Proliant RAID card installed.  It's a "Compaq Smart 2/P" card, and it has the ability to configure several drives in various RAID configurations.  I had to go through some effort to actually create/define the array but once that was done, I installed SME as if it were installing to a single drive.  SME found the appropriate driver during install and haven't had any problems since.

Since you have a genuine Compaq server, you probably have a Compaq SmartStart CD set.  If the disk controller is truely a RAID card, you can use the SmartStart configuration to set up the RAID array then just install SME and select the option for installing to a single drive.

Also, that SmartStart setup CD should be able to tell you exactly what hardware is installed.  Many of those Compaq servers had basic configurations but there were many variations available for most of them.  That may make it difficult to find out exactly what the configuration of that server was when initially purchased.  

Another thing to note, if you have IDE drives, I don't think Compaq had (until very recently) an IDE array card, most compaq servers were setup with SCSI drives.

Good luck on getting things resolved - or not resolved, whichever way you decide to go....

Dave