Asus Motherboard RAID

[AE7]

Hey guys,

I have an Asus P5BV-C/4L motherboard with a Marvell 6145 RAID controller onboard. And I am trying to get it to operate as a regular controller without any RAID on it. I plan to use software RAID. The Marvell 6145 has been disabled in the BIOS.

But when I boot up the CentOS 5.4 installer, the 5 disks are not showing up inside anaconda. There are 4 hard drives connected to the Marvell controller's ports and 1 drive on the regular controller's ports. I have no clue what's going on here...

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Irithori]

Have the missing 4 drives been in a RAID before?

afaik, this writes some signature to the drives in an area usually not available as normal diskspace.
This raid signature then prevents the drives from showing up as regular disks, even if the controller is set to non-raid.

So what you could try:
- Go to raid mode again.
- enter the raid bios
- disassemble the raidconfig
- on next boot, go to non-raid config for the controller

Might be worth a try.


Ah wait.
You wrote, that you disabled that controller.

Well, you need it
As the disks are attached to it.
But make sure, that there is no raid configured.
Inside the raid bios, this would be called "single disk" or similar

[AE7]

Have the missing 4 drives been in a RAID before?

afaik, this writes some signature to the drives in an area usually not available as normal diskspace.
This raid signature then prevents the drives from showing up as regular disks, even if the controller is set to non-raid.

So what you could try:
- Go to raid mode again.
- enter the raid bios
- disassemble the raidconfig
- on next boot, go to non-raid config for the controller

Might be worth a try.


Ah wait.
You wrote, that you disabled that controller.

Well, you need it
As the disks are attached to it.
But make sure, that there is no raid configured.
Inside the raid bios, this would be called "single disk" or similar

Thanks Irithori!

No, the disks have never been in a RAID. This is a brand new server build, all new hardware.

There is a jumper to select between LSI and Intel RAID BIOS. What would happen if I totally removed this jumper?

I am clueless as to why Asus would not ship the board to operate as free disks...

Thanks again!

[coopstah13]

You disabled the chipset that controls the device, so of course the installer can't detect the disks. There should be an option to configure the drives as IDE/RAID/AHCI or something like that. You need to select IDE. This should be a BIOS option, but it could be in the raid chipset config (doubtful).