Trouble Creating A Filesystem on RAID5 Array

air

Hi All,
I just read the comments in the thread below regarding the 1520 card.
Anyway, I have a Highpoint 2220 SATA RAID Card that I'm trying to get running under Suse 9.1 X86_64.
I have the hardware installed and the array created under the BIOS S/W no problem.
I downloaded the source made, installed and loaded the kernel module - all went smoothely.
However when I go to make the filesystem I'm running into problems.

According to the guide on http://www.highpoint-tech.com/manuals/RR2220_PRODUCT_UM_1.0.pdf
the first step is to do a "fdisk /dev/sda"

THis gives me a warning as you can see below.

srvr:/mnt/backup # fdisk /dev/sda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 18047.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 148.4 GB, 148444807168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 18047 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.


However when I then go to create the filesystem on the disk it crashes out.
This happens for mkfs in the same way as for mkreiserfs.


srvr:/mnt/backup # mkreiserfs /dev/sda1
mkreiserfs 3.6.13 (2003 www.namesys.com)

count_blocks: open failed (No such device or address)
Aborted



Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong would be appreciated.

Red Alert

i struggled with a highpoint raid controller for a bit before giving up and going for a AMCC/3ware one. The problem is that the highpoint's while they have an onboard RAID5 accelerator chip behave more like software RAID controllers - you might just save yourself a lot of hassle by going for something else. i tried gentoo, freebsd and debian all to no avail.

osmethod

air wrote:

Hi All,
I just read the comments in the thread below regarding the 1520 card.
Anyway, I have a Highpoint 2220 SATA RAID Card that I'm trying to get running under Suse 9.1 X86_64.
I have the hardware installed and the array created under the BIOS S/W no problem.
I downloaded the source made, installed and loaded the kernel module - all went smoothely.
However when I go to make the filesystem I'm running into problems.

According to the guide on http://www.highpoint-tech.com/manuals/RR2220_PRODUCT_UM_1.0.pdf
the first step is to do a "fdisk /dev/sda"

It's a while since I used linux but can you clarify the following.
1. Can you see the entire logical disk array? (IIRC this in Suse should look just like 1 big disk)
2. Can you explain where you are at? i.e. "I downloaded the source made, installed and loaded the kernel module - all went smoothely.
However when I go to make the filesystem I'm running into problems." this seems to imply you allready have a file system installed???? Confusing!
3. Are you installing from a cd/dvd?

osmethod

air

OK,
I went here and downloaded the open source driver at the bottom.

I followed the instructions in the readme file that is part of the pack.
I took Option 2 (Build the driver as a kernel module), built it and installed the module.

I was a bit lost as to how to proceed then so I went to the product manual on the highpoint site and picked up in Section 3 (installing the device in an existing system) after the point where the kernel module is installed.

The next step in the manual is Step 3 (mounting and partitioning the device) and my first post explains how I got on there.


RED, I hear your pain, the only reason that I went with the Highpoint in the first place was that it listed my OS as compatible where others didnt. I've found precompiled driver support for x86_64 to be pretty poor on a lot of hardware so I prefer to buy stuff with source available so that I can make it myself.
I realise that the card isnt a true hardware RAID one but it meets my needs in a lot of areas & I have it now

Osmethod, I cant see the disk in Yast or anywhere else but it shows up in fdisk as posted above.
The size etc is reported correctly (the array is currently 3 74GB Raptors configured to RAID5).

One more thing, when I first tried to make the filesystem i did a mkfs /dev/sda instead of /dev/sda1 and it ran successfully although it did give me warnings about using the entire disk, partition tables and all that of course.

air

Anyone?

deRanged

I'm using software RAID and haven't used hardware raid so I don't know how helpful this'll be.

In my raid setup I've two drives, /dev/sdb and /dev/sbc
I set up partitions on both with fdisk, giving the entire drive to the raid.
then I ran
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc /dev/sdd
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md0
e2label /dev/md0 /home

edited /etc/fstab and mounted the raid.

the big difference there is the raid device is /dev/md0 - as opposed to your /dev/sda. I don't know if you use /dev/md0 or /dev/sd<whatever> for hardware raid.

air

I might just try using /dev/sda with the mkfs command then and see how i get on.

air

OK, switching brain on again. I just needed to create the partition using fdisk first before making the filesystem on it.
As a matter of interest, will the partition automatically expand in size when I add disks to the array later or will I have to resize it from within linux somehow?

air

Just to close out this thread and in case it's of any use to anyone googling in the future I encoutered the following issues:
When I added the new partition to fstab I was getting an error about an invalid block device and of course I had to then set up the sytem to load the kernel module for the RAID card before these checks took place.
This simply meant entering modprob htpmv6 before the line
mount -av -t nonfs,noproc, nodevpts, nosmbfs -O no_netdev
in boot.localfs within init.d on my system.

I got the gist of this from the link below:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&forumid=18&threadid=137789
Thanks for everyones help on this.