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

Mon Nov 16 23:06:23 UTC 2020
H <agents at meddatainc.com>

On 11/16/2020 01:23 PM, Jonathan Billings wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 07:49:09PM -0500, H wrote:
>> 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. 
> The Intel RST RAID (aka Intel Matrix RAID) is also known as a
> fakeraid.  It isn't a hardware RAID, but instead a software RAID that
> has a fancy BIOS interface.  I believe that the mdadm tool can examine
> the RAID settings, and you can look at /proc/mdstat to see its status,
> although from what I remember from previous posts, it's better to just
> let the BIOS think it's a JBOD and use the linux software RAID tools
> directly. 
>
I see, thank you. Right now I am running off one of the disks because of the mishap, I am also waiting for a systemboard replacement at which time I can decided whether to go with Linux software RAID, ie mdadm, or back to the Intel BIOS RAID.

The latter lacks any progress indicators in BIOS when rebuilding an array which took around 20 hours for a 256 GB RAID 1 setup and it is annoying not to know the status of the rebuild etc. Could mdadm in a command window helped me answer that question?

Also, it seemed that the BIOS RAID damaged the partition table on the disks - should I expect that this happens? My guess would be no but what do I know...