[CentOS] Dell mirror raid boot problems

Tue Apr 28 01:37:02 UTC 2009
David M Lemcoe Jr. <forum at lemcoe.com>

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John R Pierce wrote:
> Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
>> Everyone,
>>
>> I was recently given a Dell raid 386 server that had drives that
>> had gone bad.  I replaced the drives with a couple terrabyte sata
>> Seagate drives, and set up the bios for a mirrored raid
>> configuration.
>>
>> I was able to install Centos 5.2 without difficulty, but when it
>> was time to perform the 1st boot it went to grub instead of
>> booting off of one of the mirrored drives.
>>
>> I could not figure out how to boot through grub, so I changed the
>> bios to look at both drives unmirrored.  At that point I was able
>> to boot to one of the drives, and the second drive was not
>> mounted.
>>
>> The raid logic is within the bios and mother board of the Dell
>> machine. Can any of you point me to some literature about making
>> this system work as a mirrored raid system.
>>
>
> What model Dell server is this?  Surely, this isn't a 386 (16 to
> 40mhz from circa 1989?!?)     What Dell RAID controller model does
> it have? They are pretty much all called PERC something, but there
> are many generations.      Is this a true raid (controller based,
> with a battery backed write cache), or a bogus soft (fake) raid
> setup?  if its the latter, I'd set it up with linux native raid,
> and not use the BIOS raid at all
>
>
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If you are using PERC, it is simply not compatible with Linux, and
should never be. It is a terrible piece of hardware. I would recommend
using dmraid.
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