RAID - hardware to running system ?

[Michael Kearey]

Bob Hartung wrote:
> RAID again.
>  I have FC1 with all upgrades.  I have now purchased an installed a 
> 3ware 7006-2 ATA Raid controller.  The 3w-xxxx.o files already exists in 
> /lib/modules/kernel/2......./drivers/scsi.  I did copy the lastest 
> version of this file ( 3w-xxxx.o ) to the directory.  When I use the 
> hardware browser the ATA cards is correctly reported.
> 
>  I find a lot of info on raid except for the "simple & basic" stuff:
>  1.  How will the two drives that are attached to the raid controller 
> appear if they are seen?  e.g. in dmesg?

The 3ware raid controller will have a BIOS that can be used to setup 
the disks. Once that is done, the disks as a raid configuration, will 
appear as one scsi disk to the Linux system.

I have a 3ware controller and 2 disks, in raid 1 (Simple mirror, data 
duplication). To see the pci card , 'lspci'. Here is mine:

  00:08.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID 
(rev 01)

>  2.  Do I need to make a device called /dev/md0 manually? Or is its 
> absence an indication that set up is incomplete?


The disk appears to Linux as /dev/sda (If no other scsi devices are 
present).  It should have nothing to do with md devices, as the raid 
is true *hardware* raid. md devices are Linux *software* raid.

>  3.  Once I know what its called and how to find it I can then makefs  
> ext3 ( so far? )

You need to configure the raid array in the Bios that the 3ware card 
has. You access it during boot by pressing 'Alt 3' (It may be tricky 
to get to it..). Once you have configured the raid array, it should be 
presented as one scsi disk to the Linux system.

You can then create partitions, make filesystems as usual..

The 3ware site has documentation that covers all of these things. In 
particular, page 14 of 
http://www.3ware.com/support/UserDocs/EscaladeUG7000-122003.pdf  tells 
you a lot..



Cheers,
Michael