CentOS - Sep 2005 - Installing on Abit BE7-RAID

I have RH 8 running on a Abit BE7-RAID motherboard.  My task is 
installing Centos 4.1 with limited knowledge on installing with hardware 
RAID.  The arrays are still in place for the two pairs of drives.

HighPoint only shows drivers up through RH 9.

Is there anyone who can take me through the steps?  Remove the existing 
arrays?  Will the drivers work with Centos 4.1?  Since I used Windows to 
download the HighPoint tar file for RH 9, I am not what I should do with it.

Todd

-- 
Ariste Software
200 D Street Ext
Petaluma, CA 94952
(707) 773-4523

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 19:26 -0700, Todd Cary wrote:
> I have RH 8 running on a Abit BE7-RAID motherboard.  My task is 
> installing Centos 4.1 with limited knowledge on installing with hardware 
> RAID.  The arrays are still in place for the two pairs of drives.
> 
> HighPoint only shows drivers up through RH 9.
> Will the drivers work with Centos 4.1?
Absolutely not. The kernel versions are far too different. Contact
HighPoint for updated drivers.

-- 
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazquez at ivazquez.net>
http://centos.ivazquez.net/

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Good luck getting a hw raid vendor (other than 3ware) to help you :-)

-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
Behalf Of Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 10:46 PM
To: CentOS mailing list
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Installing on Abit BE7-RAID

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 19:26 -0700, Todd Cary wrote:
> I have RH 8 running on a Abit BE7-RAID motherboard.  My task is 
> installing Centos 4.1 with limited knowledge on installing with
hardware 
> RAID.  The arrays are still in place for the two pairs of drives.
> 
> HighPoint only shows drivers up through RH 9.
> Will the drivers work with Centos 4.1?
Absolutely not. The kernel versions are far too different. Contact
HighPoint for updated drivers.

-- 
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazquez at ivazquez.net>
http://centos.ivazquez.net/

gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 38028b72

When I try to do the install, the install causes a fatal error, but RH 9 
installs fine.  Is there a way around this?

Todd

Todd Cary wrote:
> I have RH 8 running on a Abit BE7-RAID motherboard.  My task is 
> installing Centos 4.1 with limited knowledge on installing with 
> hardware RAID.  The arrays are still in place for the two pairs of 
> drives.
>
> HighPoint only shows drivers up through RH 9.
>
> Is there anyone who can take me through the steps?  Remove the 
> existing arrays?  Will the drivers work with Centos 4.1?  Since I used 
> Windows to download the HighPoint tar file for RH 9, I am not what I 
> should do with it.
>
> Todd
>
-- 
Ariste Software
200 D Street Ext
Petaluma, CA 94952
(707) 773-4523

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 19:26 -0700, Todd Cary wrote:
> I have RH 8 running on a Abit BE7-RAID motherboard.  My task is 
> installing Centos 4.1 with limited knowledge on installing with hardware 
> RAID.
It is _not_ hardware RAID, but FRAID (i.e., 100% software).
> The arrays are still in place for the two pairs of drives.
Understand by "array" you are talking about "regular looking ATA
drives"
that have a specific disk organization the FRAID (100% software) driver
can understand.

You either need to load an equivalent software driver under Linux (which
may or may not be possible), or use the newer kernel 2.6 LVM2-DM (Device
Mapper) which now has some FRAID meta-data support.  I've found both to
be largely _broken_ and untrustworthy in general, but I'm hopeful for
the latter in the future.
> HighPoint only shows drivers up through RH 9.
Correct, because the vendor has produced 100% proprietary, binary-only
modules for _specific_ kernel versions.  There is no GPL driver, there
is _no_ general, linkable driver (AFAICT).  FRAID has always suffered,
and will always suffer, from the fact that 100% of the RAID logic is in
the software, and that software is almost always licensed from a 3rd
party and proprietary.

The Device Mapper approach is interesting though.  Instead of relying on
the vendor's proprietary driver/logic, it can read the meta-data and use
the generic software RAID built in the Linux kernel -- by-passing any
need for the proprietary FRAID software/logic.
> Is there anyone who can take me through the steps?  Remove the existing 
> arrays?  Will the drivers work with Centos 4.1? 
The drivers won't even work on Fedora Core and even some newer Red Hat
Linux kernel updates.
> Since I used Windows to download the HighPoint tar file for RH 9,
> I am not what I should do with it.
Can you send me a link?  I'd be interested in knowing what they offer.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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