[Zorgiev]

Hello everybody.

I'm experiencing some problems installing Slackware 12 onto my VIA KT600 motherboard. I have two sata drives that worked as RAID0 with WINXP. But as I know this RAID is software raid supported by the windows driver. So I decided to use md linux driver for software raid.

As I guess the md array need to be created before installing distro.

First I made for each drive partition table of primary "Linux raid autodetect" and logical "Linux swap". Next I used mdadm to create RAID0 array in this way: mdadm --create -c4 -l0 -n2 /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

All seemed to be OK. Next I used cfdisk with /dev/md0. It seen the md0 array well. I partitioned it as a "Linux raid autodect" to make linear RAID with my third IDE drive. The IDE drive is of 40GB capacity when each SATA drive is of 80GB. The IDE drive also was partitioned with only one primary partition of type "Linux raid autodetect". The md0 device was present well and appear in /proc/partitions. fdisk shows the md0p1 partion of newly created "Linux raid autodetect". But such device file was not present in /dev. And no other partiton types were ok with this md0 device. The "mknod" magic just created the desired file but it was not operationable. I investigated a /var/log/messages and seen there some kind of kernel errors with this device. Please consider that I not proceeded to linear array creation step in cause of this issue.

Please don't take attention to my english. I try to write without mistakes as I able to do so.

Sincerely yours, Zorgiev.

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums!

Your English is fine, perfectly understandable. This is an international forum with lots of non-native speakers of English.

Originally Posted by Zorgiev

I investigated a /var/log/messages and seen there some kind of kernel errors with this device.

Ehm... do I have to ask?? Please copy&paste

[Zorgiev]

Originally Posted by Freston

Welcome to the forums!

Your English is fine, perfectly understandable. This is an international forum with lots of non-native speakers of English.


Ehm... do I have to ask?? Please copy&paste

I suggest that there is no need to copy&paste my original message. It is seen above.

Please ask to my question if you are familiar with this issue. And I want to notice that all my actions described with original post were done after CD1 boot with hugesmp kernel.

[Freston]

Oh, I'm sorry if I was unclear.

What I meant with copy&paste was: You wrote you saw kernel error messages with the device. Can you copy&paste these messages here?

Whoever is going to help you is going to need them.

[Zorgiev]

Originally Posted by Freston

Oh, I'm sorry if I was unclear.

What I meant with copy&paste was: You wrote you saw kernel error messages with the device. Can you copy&paste these messages here?

Whoever is going to help you is going to need them.

Sorry, I am unable to copy&paste this messages. I'm posting this message from my workstation with WINXP target OS. The linux I suppose to use with my home PC. And the only boot process I can do is boot using slackware distro CD.

But I remember something like "Can't bd_claim /dev/sda1; Can't bd_claim /dev/sdb1" messages.

The result of operations described above does not depends on SATA BIOS RAID mode settings.

PS. I can't imagine what the useful stuff this BIOS makes for RAID capability if it is fully software-emulated.

[Zorgiev]

Is there somebody familiar with this?

Please help.

[Zorgiev]

There is no md problem. I read Software-RAID-HOWTO, and now I know the mistake. The md does not support RAID array partioning yet. It was my mistake to try to partition software RAID array.