raid controller

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On October 4, 2005 17:16, Ryan Sanders wrote:
> > I will second what Lennart wrote and can cite first-hand
> > experience with the problem of using hardware RAID. I have a
> > couple of servers that use the MegaRAID controller. MegaRAID is
> > not exactly uncommon. I had Linux running on both of those
> > machines at one time or another, one a Dell, the other an HP,
> > both fully supporting the drives that were created by the
> > hardware controller. They were both long overdue for a refresh so
> > rather than do an upgrade and preserve the same disk formatting,
> > I wanted to do a fresh installation with LVM so that I could have
> > some flexibility. No matter which distro I tried, no current
> > version would detect the drives created by the hardware RAID
> > controller. It turns out there was a change in the megaraid
> > module after the 2.6.9 version of the kernel. The same module no
> > longer supports the older hardware. So, I blew away the hardware
> > RAID sets, disabled the RAID controllers completely, and used
> > Linux software RAID and LVM. Software RAID is not likely to
> > change to the point where you will not be able to see the drives
> > that were created by older versions whereas apparently, hardware
> > RAID support can change for the worse over time.
>
> If you are really worried about data loss, the best answer is to 
> is to back up your data first / perform regular backups ;)

Perhaps you missed the part where I said this was a fresh installation 
with the objective of switching to LVM. Clearly, data loss was not a 
worry since I was going to quite deliberately destroy all the data on 
those drives when I deleted all the partitions and created new ones 
with LVM. The issue was that the MegaRAID controller that was 
previously supported by Linux was no longer supported so I could not 
even install as the drives were no longer visible to Linux.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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