Topic: Software RAID Install Failure

[Graham]

Hi All,

I have scoured the forums and read everything with RAID in it
but cant seem to come across anyone with this problem.

I have two identical IDE discs, Seagate 40GB 7K2 set as
Primary Master & Secondary Master. The BIOS settings
are identical for both. I have an IDE CD-ROM drive set as
Secondary Slave.

The install goes slow - and at certain point fails with a complaint
about hardware faults or media errors ?

Has anyone come across this and if so what did you do to get
around it ?

I have switched of IDE Block Mode and Prefetch settings in
the BIOS as well as setting discs as NORMAL (Not LBA)
Non of this has made any difference nor has SMART=OFF

Both are connected with 80 Wire leads.

Install works fine with 1 disc.

Wondering if it could be a motherboard / BIOS / Chipset issue ?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Tom Haynes]

I think if you are running IDE RAID, the drives are supposed to be on different controllers. I tried to install Redhat IDE RAID0 on drives that were master and slave on the same controller once and it didn't work too well.

YMMV

[Graham]

Mobo is an Elite P6BAT-AP Rev 2.0 and no later BIOS bin avail.

Chipset is VIA 82C596B

Come to think about it I did see an unusual kernel message
regarding transparent bridge ?

[Michael Smith]

Here are a couple of stupid questions:  have you tried the CD-ROM as primary slave?  have you tried a different CD-ROM?

[Ewald van Gemert]

Installing a RAID does not seem to work on a newer MB.
I can't get 5.5 or 5.6 working on a MSI P4 MB.
I tried different types of drives and BIOS settings.

The installation seems to work out just fine, but after
te first reboot the problems seem to occure.

I've read different storys about all kind of problems with RAID,
but none of them seems to be a good explaination.

I've managed to install a perfectly good RAID system with
an older Asus-P2B and a PIII 700 Mhz proc.
I used 2x 60Gb disks as a RAID 1 array. -> No problem!

I'm still trying to get my new sysem working.
Related articles are:
- http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=17491.msg68119#msg68119
- http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=17491.msg68119#msg68119
- http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=17491.msg68119#msg68119

Could this be a redhat or sme problem?

[Graham]

OK, I gave up on the software RAID idea and several days later
decided to install with single disc and get tape working (after
reading about various tape reliability issues [tar/dump/bad blocks
/travan=bad&dat=good/flexbackup=bad etc] anyway, I had EXACTLY
the same problem - ie the install would fail uncompressing glibc libs
and bin out with suspected hardware / media errors.

Several days before I started this I added a strip of PC133 RAM to
the system, it had 128 MB previously, so I removed that strip and
guess what ? It all works !!!

I tested that strip with memtest and ramexam and it said it was
ok - funny thing is sme TOLD ME it was a hardware issue -

And it was !!!

I am not sure if it something to do with RAM timings - have tried
BIOS on 'normal' and 'auto' RAM timings but made no difference.