Several Questions That Would Make My Day ;-)

**stagnant7** · 09-02-2003

Hi There!
I am hoping to slowly migrate over to a different OS....(Mandrake 9.1) basically just to be different and to expand my knowledge

Well I am currently running the following:
.................................................. .................................................. .....
P4 1.8A
512 DDR RAM
40Gb ATA hd
2 X 120gb ATA hd in a RAID 0 configuration (using some RAID controller card which utilises the Silicon Image 0680 chip)
P4S333 Mobo
Leadtek Winfast GF3 Ti graphics card.
OS=WinXP and RedHat 9

I have my OS's ONLY on the separate 40gb and all my programs, movies, music etc on my "RAIDED" drives.
.................................................. .................................................. .....

My questions are as follows:

1.

I have installed at the moment redhat 9 and it doesn't detect my "RAIDED" hard drives, but i can remember reading somewhere that from redhat 7.3 onwards it should support the silicon image chip. When I install Mandrake 9.1 I'm assuming it wont be detected either. How can i get access to these "RAIDED" drives?

2.

I have everything in NTFS file system (apart from the linux partitions of course) at the moment. If i install mandrake will i be able to read AND write to my raided hard drives (which are NTFS)? if not how do i? will i have to make the file system FAT32?....if so how... by using partition magic ??

3.

I want to completely wipe my 40gb separate hd and install the OS's fresh...and although i wont be touching the raided drives at all.... i fear i will delete the contents of my "RAIDED" drives. (i.e. delete the array because winXp and the drivers, i suppose, reside on the separate 40gb drives?) will this be the case?

4.

if i do indeed wipe my 40gb hd i think i will do the following....plz tell me if this sounds good....and give me any hints you think necessary.

i will install winxp first and then install mandrake ...using its installation program and set up a dual boot ...BTW if i totally wipe my 40gb separate hd will the MBR be wiped too (i would like this so i can start fresh)? also which filesystem should i use for linux....ext3??
how big should my swap space be?? i.e. wat is the config for best performance?
which boot thingo do people prefer?? grub or lilo?

5.

This is a general question.....is it good to have programs (such as games, office, photoshop, winamp etc etc) on a separate hd to windows.
At the moment i have put my programs on the raided hd's for performance reasons....but now i am thinking.... wat if i reinstall windows/linux .....will the programs still work ??
(becase isn't information about the programs in registry, shared files, sys files etc. contained within the win OS on which will be wiped??)

perhaps in other words it makes more sense... if i totally wipe my hd and install winXP again on my separate 40gb hd will the programs such as photoshop, office etc...which are located on the "RAIDED" hd's continue to work with this fresh windows that hasnt "seen" or "governed" the installation of any of these programs??

if it is ok practise to put programs on a separate hd under winxp wat about linux? does linux like programs to be installed on separate hd's??

Well thats it....all my questions have been put forth...

any info on any of the above queries will be much appreciated..

cheers!

**Hellmasker** · 09-02-2003

u might be surprised what mdk has drivers for... and if it doesnt u should be able to find something on the net.

NTFS support is read only for now... u can read the ntfs drives but cn not write to them. (well u can change a few settings and enable write support but will probably corrupt the drives permantently if u write to them)

if u want to be sure u dotn wipe ur raid drives, unpug them b4 u start wiping things.

**Dolda2000** · 09-02-2003

1. When I look at the kernel source, I see support for "Silicon Image Medley". Does that correspond to your chipset? It might be that the kernel has found it, but that RH's installation program didn't recognize the userspace interface so that you don't "see" them. If you want to find out whether the kernel has detected your RAID array, please post the output of the following commands.

Code:

for hd in /proc/ide/hd?; do echo $hd; cat $hd/&#123;model,driver&#125;; done
cat /proc/devices
cat /proc/mdstat

2. No write support for NTFS for now; sorry. The Linux-NTFS guys have only recently figured out how NTFS works (they had to reverse-engineer everything since MS won't share any specs on NTFS), and have since concluded that write support for NTFS would be an ominous task to complete. It will probably come some day, but don't expect it in a near future. For now, you can only read from NTFS. FAT32 is readable and writable. I don't know if there are any conversion programs.

3. I don't know how your RAID chip works, of course, so I don't want to make any guarantees, but since it is hardware RAID, the array config should be within the chip itself. Therefore, the array won't be lost by anything.

4. Yeah, install Winbloze first. If you intall Linux first, the Winbloze installation program will automagically overwrite the MBR to put its swell bootloader on it without giving you a choice. For now, I recommend ext3 for Linux. Once XFS starts coming in stock distros, I'll recommend that instead.
You swap space should be "as large as necessary". Remember that your physical RAM + swap space = the total amount memory available to your programs. Since you have 512 MB RAM, you probably won't actually need swap at all, if you're not going to run an Oracle DB server or anything... Swap can always come in handy, though, and since you have a relatively large hard drive, I'd say reserve 512 MBs swap. Best performance will be achieved at 1GB swap, since the swap hashing functions are optimized for having twice as much swap as RAM, but since your system won't be swapping regularly, there's no point in wasting that much space.
Use GRUB. Use GRUB. Use GRUB. LILO is obsolete and defunct, and I don't understand why distributions still ship with it. Anyone who says differently is... stupid. =)
Seriously, though, use GRUB. LILO has its uses in a few cases, when boot files are located on drives that cannot be read via the BIOS. That's happens very seldomly, though, so if that's not the case, then GRUB is much better in all aspects.

5. In Microsloth Winbloze, there is no such thing as "OK practice". The registry will be lost when you reinstall no matter how you do it, so where you put programs doesn't matter. Some programs will recreate their registry settings from scratch when started, while others won't. Yet others have files in the system directory, and they will certainly stop working when you reinstall Winbloze. It's not like they'll work anyway; nothing does on Winbloze. =)
In Linux, "OK practice" is very well defined. Programs have very defined installations directories (see this old post for details), and what HDDs they are put on is solely defined on what you have mounted where in the filesystem. Since mounting is transparent, it doesn't matter what hard drive they are installed on, only where in the file tree they are installed.

**stagnant7** · 09-02-2003

Hi thanks heaps for your input. Here is the output for the commands you told me to input (btw i am in mandrake 9.1 now):

for hd in /proc/ide/hd?; do echo $hd; cat $hd/{model,driver}; done

/proc/ide/hda
ST340016A
ide-disk version 1.16
/proc/ide/hdb
DVD-ROM DDU1621
ide-cdrom version 4.59
/proc/ide/hdc
SONY CD-RW CRX175E
ide-scsi version 0.93
/proc/ide/hde
ST3120022A
ide-disk version 1.16
/proc/ide/hdg
ST3120022A
ide-disk version 1.16

cat /proc/devices

Character devices:
1 mem
2 pty/m%d
3 pty/s%d
4 tts/%d
5 cua/%d
6 lp
7 vcs
10 misc
14 sound
21 sg
29 fb
81 video_capture
116 alsa
128 ptm
136 pts/%d
162 raw
180 usb

Block devices:
1 ramdisk
2 fd
3 ide0
9 md
11 sr
22 ide1
33 ide2
34 ide3

cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities :
read_ahead not set
unused devices: <none>

Hope this sheds some light on my problem.....

Thanks again

**Dolda2000** · 09-02-2003

Yes, that was helpful as a first step. At least it has recognized the two 120 GB disks, but it has recognized them individually, which seems strange. What do you get if you run "file -s /dev/md0"?

**stagnant7** · 09-03-2003

Hi thanks agian for spending time with this

here is what was outputted

file -s /dev/md0

/dev/md0: symbolic link to md/0

cheers...

**Dolda2000** · 09-03-2003

Oh, I see, you're using devfs. I should have realized, since you stated that it was Mandrake. Anyhow, try again with "file -Ls /dev/md/0", then.

**stagnant7** · 09-03-2003

if i go to the mandrake control centre...and in detected hardware if i click config on one of the separate drives this is what it says

"I can't read the partition table of device hde, it's too corrupted for me

I can try to go on, erasing over bad partitions (ALL DATA will be lost!).
The other solution is to not allow DrakX to modify the partition table.
(the error is extended partition: bad magic number on disk hde.)"

Do you agree to loose all the partitions?

also it lists my silicon image 0680 medley ultra ata/133 IDE Raid contoller card under "unknown/others" and it give some information about it which may be of some use to you:

Vendor: ?CMD Technology Inc.

Bus: ?PCI

Bus identification: ?1095:680:1095:3680

Location on the bus: ?0:d:0

Description: ?PCI-680 UltraATA/133 EIDE Controller

Module: ?unknown

Media class: ?STORAGE_RAID

however there is no "config" button available.

Also it has "5513 [IDE]" listed under "(E)IDE/ATA Controllers" the following information was given about it:

Vendor: ?Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]

Bus: ?PCI

Bus identification: ?1039:5513:1043:807a

Location on the bus: ?0:2:5

Description: ?5513 [IDE]

Module: ?unknown

Media class: ?STORAGE_IDE

Ok thats about all i know about it.....on the silicon image web sit i found this extract.....what does this mean???

IDE/RAID: Linux Drivers

For versions of Linux earlier than 2.4, you will need to download a patch from http://kernel.org/

For Redhat release 7.3 or later and other releases using a kernel later than 2.4, driver support for your Silicon Image-based storage controller is already included.

Please note that you must apply the patch that matches the kernel revision of Linux that you are using. Updating Linux drivers is not like Windows where the latest driver works for all the previous revisions.

Silicon Image does not have RAID drivers for the SiI064x and SiI0680 controllers for Linux but you can utilize the native Linux RAID capabilities regardless of whether your controller board is RAID or IDE.

For other information regarding Linux IDE support, you can go to http://www.linux-ide.org/

well is saying that redhat has drivers for their other controllers but NOT the SiI0680 controllers? i went to www.linux-ide.org and it was a little baffling for me. what is syaing by "but you can utilize the native Linux RAID capabilities regardless of whether your controller board is RAID or IDE"

thanks heaps again......

**stagnant7** · 09-03-2003

Hi thanks for the speedy replies

yes here is what is stated when i input the code:

file -Ls /dev/md/0
/dev/md/0: can't read `/dev/md/0' (Permission denied).

doesn't sound good to me.....hehe but also doesn't mean much to me

**Dolda2000** · 09-03-2003

I'm getting sloppy, it seems. I should also have mentioned that you need to run it as root. Therefore, before you run the "file" command, run "su -" to log in as root.

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Several Questions That Would Make My Day ;-)

the output to the commands

the output of the code

Also this is what is in the mandrake control centre

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