Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
To make things as clear as I can this is a DELL XPS Gen 2 Series a 32 bit machine using an i386 Centos OS 5.2 that was automatically upgraded to 5.3 by yum.
oh, we thought you said a SERVER, such as a Dell PowerEdge, so we went down the wrong bunnytrail :)
"XPS Gen 2" could refer to either a Inspiron XPS laptop, or a desktop XPS Gen 2. If its a P4, then its likely the desktop, as the laptop used the Pentium-M.
The RAID controller appears to be on the mother board to me. The CPU is an Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz. BIOS version of A02.
In the bios I can turn on RAID on but when the system boots I get a grub prompt. The only way to get the system to boot is to turn off the RAID configuration and boot to one drive.
I have not seen anything regarding PERC. The SATA drives are connected directly to the motherboard.
I have still not been able to make it work as RAID.
Thanks to everyone for your help. This is my first RAID controller.
no, its not. its not a raid controller. its 'BIOS raid' aka 'fake raid'
BIOS fake raid such as that isn't supported by Linux, instead, set the controller for JBOD/ATA mode, and use the built in MD driver mirroring in Linux.
see the comments here under "SATA", http://linux.dell.com/storage.shtml#sata
the Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop has the same ICH6 southbridge IO chip as the Precision Workstation this page mentions, while the Desktop XPS Gen 2 had the previous version ICH5