# ASUS M2N-E : unable to use nvidia raid

## hybrid256

Hi, 

I owned an ASUS M2N-E board which seem to be excellent, it uses a nVidia nForce 570 Ultra and can handle raid with it's 6 sata ports (raid 0, 1, 0+1, 5, jbod)

I built a raid5 set using the raid bios made of 3 sata disks, it is available as one raid set in the bios for boot so, until then, everything seem to be perfect.

After booting on Gentoo 2006.0 AMD64 minimal install CD, the individual disks are visible but no raid set available ... i.e : I was hoping to see one disk of 500Gb (raid5 mode) and instead I see 3 disks of 250Gb each.

I install Gentoo anyway on a fourth disk hoping that building the system with a newer kernel would solve the problem but still, I can't see my raid set.

I'm now running under kernel gentoo-sources 2.6.17-r7.

Any idea on how I can use my mobo raid functions ??

Any help gladly appreciated.

Thanks.

----------

## centryfox

bump

----------

## jtaylor72

You need to do software RAID.  Search for that on here. I think I saw a Software RAID How-TO around here somewhere, maybe in the wiki.

----------

## 96140

nVidia RAID is not true hardware RAID; nVidia's RAID implementation relies on Windows to be installed, since it uses the nVidia Windows RAID driver.

----------

## teddy_doc

 *jtaylor72 wrote:*   

> You need to do software RAID.  Search for that on here. I think I saw a Software RAID How-TO around here somewhere, maybe in the wiki.

 

I'm currently suffering the same problem as the thread-starter. I found the wiki page on Software RAID, but this only works, if the device-mapper was able to create the device-node in /dev/mapper/.

For my configuration (which is mostly the same as stated above), this isn't the case, even if I add 'dodmraid' as kernel parameter, when booting the live-cd.

I googled a bit, and found dmraid on the net.

http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/

I downloaded it, and compiled it on another PC with static bindings to device-mapper.

```
./configure --enable-static_link
```

So, when I copy this binary to the livecd's /root-directory, I can see my raid when I type:

```
./dmraid -s
```

Then I tried activating the raid with

```
./dmraid -ay
```

But this lead to an device-mapper error, telling me that the kernel is missing the raid45-support.

This is the exact message:

```
device-mapper target type "raid45" not in kernel
```

However, the device-node "nvidia_XXXXXXXX" is created in /dev/mapper. But I can't do anything with it. The 2 already existing partitions (WinXP 64-bit) are not shown, and even fdisk fails with some weird error.

The I removed the device-node with

```
./dmraid -an
```

and tried modprobing the module "raid5" before activating again, but this didn't work for me either.

So, know I'm open for suggestions on how to proceed. Please!  :Wink: 

I'm following one trace, which is creating my own livecd to install gentoo from, with a patched kernel. The raid45-patch is available from the same guy, who's providing dmraid:

http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dm/dm-raid45/

But the readme says, that the patch is still at alpha-stage and that it could damage my data. That's why I'm not so eager to try, but I will if no one has another idea.

So, please help me. I want to have gentoo running on my new PC the sooner, the better!  :Wink: 

----------

## jtaylor72

Here are the steps I used to build my raid.....I'll actually post the shell script I have on a thumb drive for use when I need to boot off the live CD.  This does not include the setup with FDISK for making the partitions, but that should be easy enough.....

```

#!/bin/sh

mknod /dev/md1 b 9 1

mknod /dev/md2 b 9 2

mknod /dev/md3 b 9 3

mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4

mdadm -Cv /dev/md2 -l5 -n3 -c128 /dev/sd{a,b,c}2

mdadm -Cv /dev/md3 -l5 -n3 -c128 /dev/sd{a,b,c}3

mdadm -Cv /dev/md4 -l5 -n3 -c128 /dev/sd{a,b,c}4

swapon /dev/md2

mount /dev/md3 /mnt/gentoo

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot

mount /dev/md4 /mnt/gentoo/home

mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev

```

----------

## Brolin Empey

 *jtaylor72 wrote:*   

> Here are the steps I used to build my raid.....I'll actually post the shell script I have on a thumb drive for use when I need to boot off the live CD.  This does not include the setup with FDISK for making the partitions, but that should be easy enough.....
> 
> ```
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> ...

 

I am curious why you did not use Bash 'for' loops in this script.  I guess there might be a reason, because you have used brace expansion, so you must know more than the basics of shell scripting.

To return to the original topic, I can say that I also had problems with an nVidia RAID controller on a different Asus motherboard: a K8N (Socket 754).  I could not boot Linux from a SATA hard disk when the nVidia RAID controller was enabled.  From this experience, I learned about nVidia's "fake RAID".

----------

