Installing Redhat 7.2 to a hdd on a raid controller!

[montyturbo]

:confused:

I'm trying to install redhat 7.2 on my system, that already dual boots WinXP and Win 98. My system has two maxtor 40gb hdd, on a highpoint 370 raid controller, configured as a stripe array.

Problem is every time I come to the drive partitioning section of the redhat installation I get a error box saying....

'The partition table on device hde was unreadable. To create a new partition it must be initialized causing loss of all data on the drive on this drive. Would you like to initialise this drive?'

Is there a way around this problem? Am I doing something wrong or does redhat 7.2 simply not support this kind of installation?

Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

John

[rustskull]

My first question would be why are you using a raid controller in the first place?

If you have the option to not use it, I would not use it. It buys you nothing on two drives, unless you're mirroring and only using one of them. With the performance of today's drives and the system around them, there is minimal performance advantage to interleaving and/or striping. It's a philosophical issue that has mainly died out because of these factors.

I could have gone into a technical discussion regarding metadata and **** like that, but really, your problem could be simplified unless you are required for some reason to use the raid features.

If you're not married to the raid config, you should be able to turn it off (the striping) and your disks will thrash for a while when it rebuilds the file allocation tables n stuff. After that you should be able to fire up the installation and work with it as normal partitions. At least that's what happened with my ultra-60 box (Sun) at work when we tossed the array and went to SAN (storage area network).

If you are married to the raid config, you probably need a different disk partitioning utility that recognises raid and can pullup the metainitialization. You'll probably need to know what type of raid you have (there's different styles that are different combinations of mirroring and striping defined, you can probably find a howto out there somewhere...GOOGLE IT!) and someone might have a utility out there for manipulating an array manually. Check with the raid controller mfr too, if you don't find anything else out.

But ditch the raid if at all possible. It was originally meant to store large amounts of data on tons of drives, back when the big drives only had a couple hundered meg on em. Reliability was crappy back then (for multiple reasons) and performance was crappy too...so raid made sense. It doesn't really make any sense for home use...if you are concerned about your data, then the best defense is a reliable back u p strategy of critical files. Most people can fit all their data on a regular cd, most people I know use a few cdrw and cycle the same discs through on some sort of schedule. one lucky bastard has a dvd-r, but not rw (yet, they're gettin cheaper!). He can back up all of his stuff, even his biggest apps he's wrote and source versions and everything on pretty much one disc (he can get 5G on a formatted disc). He does monthlies on the dvd (or sooner if something important has been saved recently) and dailies automatically on cdrw.

The only person I know who uses a raid controller at home did so on that system because it was the only ata/100 channel available on that system, and that *does* give a marked improvement over 66 and significantly over 33.

as usual, more information that was probably needed or asked for.

-rust

[montyturbo]

Thanks for the advice rustskull, I'm not going to go into the if's and but's of why I use raid controllers on our machines, I will just say that in the industry in which I work we need every ounce of performance we can possibly get out of our hardware and raid controllers have proved very beneficial.

I have tried to partition the drives using another utility 'Powerquest partition magic' but the Redhat installer still sees the array as two seperate drives and won't let installation be done to the partitions created with partition magic.

Is there any way round this problem which doesn't involve destroying my raid array?

Cheers
John