Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
dmesg gives me: atapci1: port 0xec00-0xec0f,0xe880-0xe887,0xe800-0xe80f,0xe480-0xe487,0xe400-0xe41f mem 0xd800-0xdbff irq 21 at device 31.1 on pci0 Two pairs of drives are identical in terms of partitions, and no ar0 devices found, So I'd guess I have one of those "crappy software raid's:" that you mention. Guess I'll buy 2 new disks, format to 165's, build a BSD-software raid, take the two of the origonals over to the neighbor's for an off-site backup. Thanks all, Steve On 1/22/07, Damian Wiest <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 11:33:47AM -0700, Steve Franks wrote: > I'm tired of win2k crashing, and we won't even go into my opinion of vista's > strongarm marketing tactics (read: changing my hardware means I have to pay > again? they can keep their OS). > > Problem is, I've got 320GB of accumulated detrius on ntfs volumes to > migrate. I see there is some good r/w ports for ntfs, so I'm willing to > evaluate that to see if it's stable (shoestring budget here obviously - this > is my personal stuff only). > > Forging ahead, I get ready to start playing the mounting game, but > lo-and-behold, suddenly I have 4 disks whereas in windows I had two. Now I > praise FreeBSD for it's superior intellect here, but now I have a problem. > I want two 160GB mirrored volumes, not 4 unmirrored ones. The RAID is an > ASUS P5DR1-VM motherboard with a ULI raid chipset onboard. Very nice setup > for the money. > > Is this normal? Am I going to break my mirror if I mount a single disk? If > so, how do I mount a mirror? > > Thanks, > Steve > > -- > Steve Franks, KE7BTE > Staff Engineer > La Palma Devices, LLC > http://www.lapalmadevices.com > (520) 312-0089 It sounds like your onboard RAID chip is either not supported, or the appropriate driver is not being loaded. Can you post the output of dmesg? Also, be aware that you may not really have a hardware RAID chip. Many (most?) times the onboard chips simply make multiple disks look like a single LUN to the operating system; they also require driver support. Real hardware RAID chips/cards tend to be expensive, proprietary, don't require an OS driver and include a battery backup system for data in the RAID cache should the system lose power. You may want to read up on gmirror. -Damian ps. I've got at least a half-dozen different x86 system boards that include these crappy RAID chips from vendors like nVidia, Intel, Adaptec, LSI, etc. Typically you get closed-source, Windows-only driver support. pps. If you do want real hardware RAID support under FreeBSD, I've had great experiences with the Promise arrays (m500 and m300) and one of the PCI cards (I'd have to check on the exact model). -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 07:16:59PM -0600, Damian Wiest wrote: Forging ahead, I get ready to start playing the mounting game, but lo-and-behold, suddenly I have 4 disks whereas in windows I had two. Now I praise FreeBSD for it's superior intellect here, but now I have a problem. I want two 160GB mirrored volumes, not 4 unmirrored ones. The RAID is an ASUS P5DR1-VM motherboard with a ULI raid chipset onboard. Very nice setup for the money. Is this normal? Am I going to break my mirror if I mount a single disk? If so, how do I mount a mirror? I have a Gigabyte motherboard GA-7N400Pro2 with an onboard IDE RAID controller IT8212F. Two IDE disks of 80GB connected on it. I have created a RADI-1 volume using the onboard RAID utility and partitioned the volume (50-50) while installing windows. In windows I could see two primary partitions. When I installed FreeBSD 6.1, sysinstall gave me the option of installing on three different disks. The "ad0", "ad1" and "ar0". The last is the RAID-1 volume that FreeBSD recognises by default. I chose "ar0" and proceeded to install into the second partition of the volume. All well so far. I chose to install Gnome 2.16 from Tinderbox which brought HAL along the way. When I booted the Gnome desktop, I saw a sum of six partitions, thanks to HAL not separating/hiding the drives that the RAID-1 volume consists of (a known issue). Maybe this is what you see? I also wonder, since I have never had a true PCI RAID controller together with FreeBSD, if every RAID volume behaves like this. I am familiar with the term "soft-raid controller" and clarifying, it means that it is half implemented as hardware, and half as software (something like win-modems). That's why FreeBSD sees the detailed "interior" of the array - the driver can control the whole RAID process, add/remove member disks and so on. I could be wrong about this, gotta get some hardware to test. Thanasis Rizoulis Electronic Computing Systems Engineer Greece ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 07:16:59PM -0600, Damian Wiest wrote: > On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 11:33:47AM -0700, Steve Franks wrote: > > I'm tired of win2k crashing, and we won't even go into my opinion of vista's > > strongarm marketing tactics (read: changing my hardware means I have to pay > > again? they can keep their OS). > > > > Problem is, I've got 320GB of accumulated detrius on ntfs volumes to > > migrate. I see there is some good r/w ports for ntfs, so I'm willing to > > evaluate that to see if it's stable (shoestring budget here obviously - this > > is my personal stuff only). > > > > Forging ahead, I get ready to start playing the mounting game, but > > lo-and-behold, suddenly I have 4 disks whereas in windows I had two. Now I > > praise FreeBSD for it's superior intellect here, but now I have a problem. > > I want two 160GB mirrored volumes, not 4 unmirrored ones. The RAID is an > > ASUS P5DR1-VM motherboard with a ULI raid chipset onboard. Very nice setup > > for the money. > > > > Is this normal? Am I going to break my mirror if I mount a single disk? If > > so, how do I mount a mirror? First, I am guessing that what you say is just correct - somehow you are seeing your disks in a non-raid form rather than treating it as a raid. Second of all, if you mount one side of the mirror as read-only, and use that to read up what is on the drive, it should not break anything. You can't write NTFS in FreeBSD anyway - or couldn't the last I knew. You can only read NTFS in FreeBSD. You should only have to read one disk of each of the two mirrors. Then you can copy that stuff to some safe place - on another drive probably - check it out and make sure it is ok and then reuse those other 4 drives for something. Maybe you can find a raid controller that works or figure out how to use the one you have and use those disks over again - now nicely reset to FreeBSD type (165) and with FreeBSD filesystems built on them. I have only used one raid in FreeBSD so far (and don't have it now) and it worked just fine after I figured out what driver it needed. So, have hope. You can get it to work. One more thing, is it at all possible that you are really seeing four slices and two of them are vendor diagnostic/maintenance slices - one for each raid rather than four actual disks? Those don't show up in MS but FreeBSD sees them. That occasionally throws people when they think they should be on slice 1 (or slice 2 if dual booting) and it is really slice 2 (or 3 for dual boot) because of the vendor slice on the front of the drive.Just an extra thought. jerry > > Thanks, > > Steve > > > > -- > > Steve Franks, KE7BTE > > Staff Engineer > > La Palma Devices, LLC > > http://www.lapalmadevices.com > > (520) 312-0089 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 01:35:06AM -0600, Damian Wiest wrote: > On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 07:16:59PM -0600, Damian Wiest wrote: > > [snip] > > > Real hardware RAID chips/cards tend to be expensive, > > proprietary, don't require an OS driver and include a battery backup > > system for data in the RAID cache should the system lose power. > > I don't know what I was thinking, of course the hardware RAID systems > require drivers. Of course, what you meant to say was that they don't require an OS raid utility to zip the raid together. They look like a single hardware device and the driver must just be for that device sort of like any other device. jerry > > -Damian > ___ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 07:16:59PM -0600, Damian Wiest wrote: [snip] > Real hardware RAID chips/cards tend to be expensive, > proprietary, don't require an OS driver and include a battery backup > system for data in the RAID cache should the system lose power. I don't know what I was thinking, of course the hardware RAID systems require drivers. -Damian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 11:33:47AM -0700, Steve Franks wrote: > I'm tired of win2k crashing, and we won't even go into my opinion of vista's > strongarm marketing tactics (read: changing my hardware means I have to pay > again? they can keep their OS). > > Problem is, I've got 320GB of accumulated detrius on ntfs volumes to > migrate. I see there is some good r/w ports for ntfs, so I'm willing to > evaluate that to see if it's stable (shoestring budget here obviously - this > is my personal stuff only). > > Forging ahead, I get ready to start playing the mounting game, but > lo-and-behold, suddenly I have 4 disks whereas in windows I had two. Now I > praise FreeBSD for it's superior intellect here, but now I have a problem. > I want two 160GB mirrored volumes, not 4 unmirrored ones. The RAID is an > ASUS P5DR1-VM motherboard with a ULI raid chipset onboard. Very nice setup > for the money. > > Is this normal? Am I going to break my mirror if I mount a single disk? If > so, how do I mount a mirror? > > Thanks, > Steve > > -- > Steve Franks, KE7BTE > Staff Engineer > La Palma Devices, LLC > http://www.lapalmadevices.com > (520) 312-0089 It sounds like your onboard RAID chip is either not supported, or the appropriate driver is not being loaded. Can you post the output of dmesg? Also, be aware that you may not really have a hardware RAID chip. Many (most?) times the onboard chips simply make multiple disks look like a single LUN to the operating system; they also require driver support. Real hardware RAID chips/cards tend to be expensive, proprietary, don't require an OS driver and include a battery backup system for data in the RAID cache should the system lose power. You may want to read up on gmirror. -Damian ps. I've got at least a half-dozen different x86 system boards that include these crappy RAID chips from vendors like nVidia, Intel, Adaptec, LSI, etc. Typically you get closed-source, Windows-only driver support. pps. If you do want real hardware RAID support under FreeBSD, I've had great experiences with the Promise arrays (m500 and m300) and one of the PCI cards (I'd have to check on the exact model). ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
Steve Franks wrote: > I want two 160GB mirrored volumes, not 4 unmirrored ones. The RAID is an > ASUS P5DR1-VM motherboard with a ULI raid chipset onboard. Very nice setup > for the money. I don't know about the chipset or the controller, but judging from the symptoms it's highly likely you actually have a soft-RAID controller, and the actual RAID stuff was done by your Windows driver. **IF** the driver was benign enough, you could *maybe* reconstitute a mirrored volume with FreeBSD's software RAID driver, gmirror. See the man page for details, but a command like "gmirror label mydisk /dev/ad4 /dev/ad5" will create mirrored device /dev/mirror/mydisk which you can then try to mount (actually if it works you'll see individual partitions like /dev/mirror/mydisks1, etc.). BUT! 1. The above command will overwrite the last sectors on both drives with its data (which you'll have to clean if you don't want the mirror anymore). Usually they are unused but maybe the Windows driver used them so you won't be able to use them under Windows. 2. Be very very careful - if this doesn't result in a valid mirrored drive or the Windows driver did something unusual or nasty, you might destroy the data by writing to the mirrored drive (just reading it will not cause any damage). Mount the drive read-only first, and check you can see valid data. Be absolutely sure before mounting it read/write (and be careful about mounting NTFS read-write anyway - it's not risk-free). signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
I suppose a couple of other details are in order: 1. FreeBSD is installed on a completely different disk. 2. I checked, and the motherboard still thinks they are mirrored. Steve On 1/16/07, Steve Franks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I'm tired of win2k crashing, and we won't even go into my opinion of vista's strongarm marketing tactics (read: changing my hardware means I have to pay again? they can keep their OS). Problem is, I've got 320GB of accumulated detrius on ntfs volumes to migrate. I see there is some good r/w ports for ntfs, so I'm willing to evaluate that to see if it's stable (shoestring budget here obviously - this is my personal stuff only). Forging ahead, I get ready to start playing the mounting game, but lo-and-behold, suddenly I have 4 disks whereas in windows I had two. Now I praise FreeBSD for it's superior intellect here, but now I have a problem. I want two 160GB mirrored volumes, not 4 unmirrored ones. The RAID is an ASUS P5DR1-VM motherboard with a ULI raid chipset onboard. Very nice setup for the money. Is this normal? Am I going to break my mirror if I mount a single disk? If so, how do I mount a mirror? Thanks, Steve -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
hardware mirrors recognized as individual disks in fbsd
I'm tired of win2k crashing, and we won't even go into my opinion of vista's strongarm marketing tactics (read: changing my hardware means I have to pay again? they can keep their OS). Problem is, I've got 320GB of accumulated detrius on ntfs volumes to migrate. I see there is some good r/w ports for ntfs, so I'm willing to evaluate that to see if it's stable (shoestring budget here obviously - this is my personal stuff only). Forging ahead, I get ready to start playing the mounting game, but lo-and-behold, suddenly I have 4 disks whereas in windows I had two. Now I praise FreeBSD for it's superior intellect here, but now I have a problem. I want two 160GB mirrored volumes, not 4 unmirrored ones. The RAID is an ASUS P5DR1-VM motherboard with a ULI raid chipset onboard. Very nice setup for the money. Is this normal? Am I going to break my mirror if I mount a single disk? If so, how do I mount a mirror? Thanks, Steve -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
