Linux and hardware RAID

[VectraMan]

I have a lovely pair of Seagate 1TB drives in my desktop, set up as a mirrored array using the hardware RAID controller.

My understanding was that as the hardware would be doing the RAID, the OS would only ever see the one drive, and this is the case under Windows (Windows 7 x64) what I've installed.

I've left some space on the end for a Linux install, but when I boot from a Kubuntu CD it detects two seperate drives, not the one combined drive as I expected. Why? I guess if I went through the install, it would use a partition on only one of the mirrored set. That wouldn't be so bad, but I wanted both OSs to be able to use data on a middle NTFS partition, and surely if Kubuntu isn't working with RAID for some reason, any writes to that data partition will result in the two being out of sync.

Confused. Should I buy a Mac?

[dinker]

Presumably the controller needs to be initialised/configured in some way?

[darmstadt]

When I used to build servers with Linux and RAID there were a number of steps I used to have to do, at least ensure that the Linux system has the drivers and a RAID manager. I used to have 6 disks and set it up with just 2 logical drives, 1 for Linux OS and the other for data and Linux always only ever saw 2 drives. It might just be possible that the dual boot you have is causing some kind of intereference

[VectraMan]

Oh FFS.

Check out the 20 odd pages of terrifying command lines required to make Linux do something that just works in Windows:

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

It's not like these devices are uncommon (this is a 2 year old Dell Desktop).

[lilelvis2000]

Its probably what's known as "fake RAID". Did your RAID controller come with a CD containing a device driver for Windows? If so...its fake raid.

You'll end up using the mdadm commands to create the RAID. Then Splat a LVM ontop of it..then format...and so on and so on.