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Siim K
Asked: 2010-11-09 08:23:12 +0800 CST

What utilities could I use to create/manage the Intel SRCU31L RAID volumes in Debian Linux?

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I've got an old box that I don't want to scrap yet because it's got a nice working 5-disk RAID assembly. I want to create 2 arrays: RAID 1 with 2 disks and RAID 5 with the other 3 disks.

The RAID card is Intel SRCU31L. I can create the RAID 1 volume in the console that you access with Ctrl+C at startup. But it only allows for creation of one volume so I can't do anything with the 3 remaining disks.

I installed Debian Lenny on the RAID 1 volume and it worked out nicely. What utilites could I now use to create/manage the RAID volumes in Debian Linux? I installed the raidutils package but get an error when trying to fetch a list: #raidutil -L controller or #raidutil -L physical

# raidutil -L controller
osdOpenEngine  : 11/08/110-18:16:08  Fatal error, no active controller device files found.
Engine connect failed: Open

What could I try to get this thing working? Can you suggest any other tools?

Command #lspci -vv gives me this about the controller:

00:06.1 I2O: Intel Corporation Integrated RAID (rev 02) (prog-if 01)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 0001
    Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Step                                                                                                 ping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx-
    Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort                                                                                                 - <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
    Latency: 64, Cache Line Size: 32 bytes
    Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 26
    Region 0: Memory at f9800000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=8M]
    [virtual] Expansion ROM at 30020000 [disabled] [size=64K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: PCI_I2O
    Kernel modules: i2o_core
debian raid

2 Answers

  1. Forget about the raid card and LVM the disks.. Its much nicer to manage..

    Is just my opinion, though find some tools on the intel site?? In my past ive found, Debian is notorious for not supporting RAID cards.. (one of the reasons i moved to Centos actually) :D

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  2. Linux has several implementation of how RAID can be done:

    • Pure HW RAID - controller driver required for management, not always for use, this is what you need
    • dmraid - manages software RAID, arrays created by some HW RAID controllers or by non-true, so called BIOS-RAID, maybe this will work for you
    • mdraid - pure Linux native software RAID, very fast, easy, safe, active, not related to HW RAID

    I see that Intel has it's own linux utility to manage this RAID controller. Probably you will need some old libraries for compatibility and I hope new kernel has same abilities for these utilities to recognize device.

    Good luck

    LVM has nothing to do with RAID!!!

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