Hi, all. Hopefully this is an easy one for the SATA guys, as I'm fairly new to this. I had a system running fine in FC9 on a single SATA disk. I added a second disk (exactly the same drive) and setup the BIOS utility for RAID1.

My windows partition booted fine, and I was able to download the RAID software from VIA to enable RAID1 in WinXP without any real issues.

In Fedora, I am seeing what I saw in XP before the driver picked it up. I get two of the same setup on the disks, but it's not in RAID. It's like two single disks running. Here's the "fdisk -l" output:

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0cea0cea

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1912 15358108+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 1913 30400 228829860 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 1913 10198 66557263+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 10199 10230 257008+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 10231 10491 2096451 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 10492 30400 159919011 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb219d6da

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 1912 15358108+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 1913 30400 228829860 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5 1913 10198 66557263+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb6 10199 10230 257008+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 10231 10491 2096451 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb8 10492 30400 159919011 83 Linux

Disk /dev/dm-0: 163.7 GB, 163756538880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19908 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table
[root@localhost ~]# cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)
[root@localhost ~]#




Do I need a kernel module enabled in order to get this working in RAID1? Or is it just a matter of doing something in mdadm....though I thought that was only for software-based RAID?

Any info would be appreciated.

-DP

Part of the problem is that 99% of motherboard raid is Fake raid rather than Hardware raid. In most (not all) instance you will be better off using soft raid rather than fake raid. The other problem is that in a lot of instances you cannot access fake raid setups from another OS due to slight fake raid driver differences (ie windows will not be able to see Linux and Linux will not be able to see windows). True hardware raid works before the OS loads, so it does not suffer from this issue.

Thanks for the reply, but it doesn't really help my issue. Is there a driver available for this chipset to enable the (even fake) hardware RAID for this, for Fedora Core 9?

Linux on fakeraid is a very interesting and challenge topic. Like lazlow said, software raid is better solution.
Since you insist on using fakeraid, the first place you can find the driver is manufacturer's website, http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action and viaarena's website. I don't know your motherboard model, but most manufacturers don't provide fakeraid driver for linux; if they do, only RHEL and SUSE Enterprise.
Good luck.

Thanks for the URL, but it looks like the newest this goes is FC8, and I'm running FC9. I guess I will need to wait for the driver to be made for this, as they appear to not have the source code for the SATA controller available (only the Ethernet, sound, and video).

BTW, my board is an Asrock 4CoreDX90-VSTA. Asrock doesn't have a driver for linux available.

You are going to run into a never ending circle this way. Support for any one version of Fedora is for only about one year. It generally takes them about six months (if you are lucky) for the manufactures to release a version for a new OS. Shortly after F10 is released they may release a driver for F9.