Mageia forum

So I've taken my first stab at playing around with a small RAID array on my machine. Problem is now I can't boot to my Linux drive and the installer never installs a RAID driver. The setup is as follows:

Gigabyte Motherboard, X470 chipset
Hardware RAID controller on
Win10 on NVME drive
Linux on 250 GB SSD SATA drive
1x 2TB Seagate HD for storage
2x 320 HD in RAID 0 config

I have an existing install on the 250GB SSD that I'm trying to get to, but the installer in Mageia 6&7 refuses to recognize any devices on the RAID controller. Is there something I'm missing where I have to install some kind of driver, or enable a kernel option, or sacrifice several penguins to please the gods of Linux?

If you're talking about the standard motherboard chipset controller (and not a dedicated RAID controller) then my recommendation is to burn some sage and use a bargepole to turn it back off. IMHO it's a whole headache with little benefit.

If you are going to be using your RAID array exclusively in Linux then have a read up on mdadm

Magic is more or less correct. If your using the motherboard raid, it's not real raid, it's fake raid. You'll find all sorts of arguments on the web, but it is fake. ie. you need a driver to operate it, but the OS can still see each drive. (AFAIK real raid has it's own controller and only ever appears to the OS as one disc).

I built my main home desktop over 10 years ago, it's got the Intel raid controller on it: Now it's called Intel Storage Matrix or something similar..

Anyways end result, after years of messing around, was that the motherboard is more or less really only capable of booting a raid array off windows: You probably can make linux do it, but I never could.

So I ended up with a boot drive, with windows, my main linux root partition, and then I can mess around on other partitions with test installs..
I then have 4 HDD's, 2 drives in each raid array (mirroring). These raid arrays are 'created' by the intel system which you access during boot.

I have it managed via dmraid, which is now sooooo old and unmaintained, and AFAIK doesn't even have the ability to rebuild the array if there is a problem... That's the main reason I've still got windows, I rarely boot there and can see via the intel software the raid condition.

Raid is great in theory, but there's not a one-size-fits-all setup. (This is a bug/feature of linux in general, soooooo many ways to achieve the same thing).

What is the purpose of the raid array? Is it just a single OS system? Do other systems access it via smb/ftp/ssh/other servers?

If you can get away with using mdadm I'd seriously recommend that: It's stable, well supported, used through out industry/enterprise. Easily repaired/accessible/maintainable etc.

Relying on a hardware board kinda ties to that, and if that board dies..... hope that it is accessible on another system.

I feel your pain, the onboard raid was one of the main reasons I bought the motherboard I did, and it turned out to be a huge PITA.

My Intel motherboard user manual specifically warns that if you enable RAID, all ATA devices will operate in RAID mode, due to a limitation in the Intel chipset. It's an older chipset than yours, but maybe the same still applies.

Fake RAID using dmraid is handled by the Mageia installer, but there's a bug in Mageia 7 that prevents the installed system booting if it's installed on the RAID array:
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25027

Well, I ordered a second nvme drive, and I'll just run Linux off that. It's kind of bunk they can't incorporate a RAID controller into a motherboard. I had an old ABIT board back in the early 2000s that had a legit RAID controller on board. I had what amounted to a second POST screen at every start up for configuring the RAID. Thanks everyone for the information.