[CentOS] Intel RST RAID 1, partition tables and UUIDs

Mon Nov 16 00:49:09 UTC 2020
H <agents at meddatainc.com>

I have been having some problems with hardware RAID 1 on the motherboard that I am running CentOS 7 on. After a BIOS upgrade of the system, I lost the RAID 1 setup and was no longer able to boot the system.

Testdisk revealed that the partition tables had been damaged and because I had earlier saved information from fdisk, I was able to recreate the partitions. However, booting into the BIOS and recreating/synchronizing the RAID from one of the disks (took around 20 hours for 256 GB disks), I again lost the ability the boot and the partition tables were similarly damaged. Eventually I was able to boot the system again from one of the two disks and it is now up and running, now running without RAID.

- Should I expect that the Intel RAID 1 setup changes the partition tables? I should add that the disks were originally created after the RAID 1 was setup.

- After fooling around with testdisk (and prior to that, parted), it turned out that I had lost the disk UUID for both disks, they were both set to 000... Partition UUIDs seemed unchanged from before, including the LUKS partitions. Are disk UUIDs (not partition UUIDs) not used by Linux since I have not - yet - seen any effects of the missing disk UUIDs?

Because there seems to be a couple of other issues with the motherboard, I expect to have it replaced early this week but I am still interested in learning more.

Thanks.