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I currently have 4 drives setup in Raid 10. I've tried installing Ubuntu straight to the metal but it does not recognize my Windows partition and upon quitting the installation and then restarting, my raid goes Offline.

Ive also tried creating a partition and using the Windows version of the installer (through windows). When it restarts and begins finalizing the installation, it snags and complains that it can not find the installation iso. Again, restarting shows that my raid members are offline.

Any ideas?

ppetraki
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Chance
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  • Have a 5th HDD being overnighted, hoping my mobo/raid controller will allow for a 5th, non-raid drive and also allow it to be a startup drive. – Chance Apr 01 '11 at 21:37
  • Are you using a hardware RAID system where a single device is presented to the operating system, or some kind of software RAID? – James Henstridge Apr 02 '11 at 03:36
  • It is the on-board raid controller on this mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128358 – Chance Apr 02 '11 at 15:09

2 Answers2

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It sounds like you've got a "fake raid" system. That is, the operating system directly accesses the disks and the BIOS has enough smarts to boot off such RAID disk sets.

This is supported in Linux via the dmraid package, which should configure the the set as a /dev/mapper/something device (you don't want to install anything to the underlying /dev/sdX devices, since they refer to individual member disks in the RAID set). The following page should give some details on how to install Ubuntu on such a system:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto

When booting from the install CD, it would be worth picking the "Try Ubuntu" option first and checking whether the RAID set has been detected correctly.

James Henstridge
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  • Sorry, I missed this answer awhile ago. When I boot into a CD/USB I am able to mount the raid's partitions but doing so degrades my raid upon startup. I also can not boot into ubuntu on the OS selection screen (it fails there). – Chance Apr 12 '11 at 13:50
  • The only thing fake raid is good for is sharing the same volume between windows and Linux. It usually doesn't offer **any increase in performance**. If you can live without that, then you can dramatically simplify your life here. – ppetraki Nov 22 '11 at 14:21
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Not sure if this will help or not, but you may want to check this out: http://salamander-linux.com/install.php

Ctuchik
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  • Ah thanks, it sounded really promising until I read this: "the first RAID-only step, the user is asked to select which physical disks should be used in the RAID array." :( – Chance Apr 01 '11 at 21:30