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How To Set-Up Soft RAID (dmraid) in Linux Mint 6 (Felicia)

25 Dec

There are a countless number of dmraid tutorials on the internet that are over complicated and that do not apply to Linux Mint 6 (Felicia). Here I will show you in a few easy steps how to set-up dmraid using the Linux Mint 6 Live CD without any unnessessary frustration. The basis of my tutorial is the Ubuntu dmraid documentation and assumes that you are setting up RAID 0 or 1.

1. Go into your motherboard’s BIOS and turn on the RAID support

2. Go into your RAID’s BIOS and set-up your RAID partition

3. Boot the Live CD

4. Open Terminal and type the following:

sudo apt-get install dmraid

5. Once completed the above installation, type the following:

sudo modprobe dm-raid4-5

6. Now it’s time to install Linux Mint

7. Upon reaching the partition menu, select your RAID partition

8. Upon reaching the install confirmation menu (step 7 of 7), click on the Advanced button and uncheck install boot loader

9. Once the installation is completed, check your partitions by typing the following in Terminal:

cd /dev/mapper

and then:

dir

10. Copy the partition without a number; I will use dabdgddgLinuxFTW as an example

11. Now we have to see how the partitions are set-up, so type the following in Terminal:

sudo fdisk dabdgddgLinuxFTW

12. Type p in Terminal to see the actual partitions:

13. Note and copy which partition is the Linux partition (the other ones you will see is extended and swap); I will usedabdgddgLinuxFTW1 as an example

14. Type q in Terminal to exit fdisk

15. Now we have to mount the RAID partition in order to set-up grub by typing the following in Terminal:

sudo mount dabdgddgLinuxFTW1 /target

and

sudo mount –bind /dev /target/dev

(there should be two dashes before bind)

and

sudo mount -t proc proc /target/proc

and

sudo mount -t sysfs sys /target/sys

16. Now we have to set-up grub by typing the following in Terminal:

sudo chroot /target

and

apt-get install dmraid

and

apt-get install grub

and

mkdir /boot/grub

and

cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/* /boot/grub
or
cp /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-pc/* /boot/grub

and

grub –no-curses

and

device (hd0) /dev/mapper/dabdgddgLinuxFTW

and

root (hd0,0)

and

setup (hd0)

and

quit

and

update-grub

(press y when asked to confirm)

17. Finally reboot.

You should now have your boot times and load times halved. Hopefully in Ubuntu 9.04 and Linux Mint 7 full RAID support will be integrated with the Live CD.

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13 Comments

Posted by on December 25, 2008 in Linux

 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

13 Responses to How To Set-Up Soft RAID (dmraid) in Linux Mint 6 (Felicia)

  1. Manuel

    January 5, 2009 at 12:48 am

    Hi, thanks for the guide. I have a problem, after inserting the command: ” grub –no-curses” I get this error:

    Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

    Unknown partition table signature

    [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For
    the first word, TAB lists possible command
    completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
    completions of a device/filename. ]
    grub> device (hd0) /dev/mapper/isw_bbhgichgbb_Stripe
    device (hd0) /dev/mapper/isw_bbhgichgbb_Stripe
    grub> root (hd0,0)
    root (hd0,0)
    grub> setup (hd0)
    setup (hd0)

    Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition

     
  2. Paul Weiss

    January 5, 2009 at 1:22 am

    Is your RAID partition totally dedicated and clean? If not try to delete and create your RAID partition in your RAID’s BIOS. And can you please post the output from this:

    find /boot/grub/stage1

     
  3. Jim

    February 16, 2009 at 8:56 pm

    Sorry but I think you left out a couple of steps

     
  4. Paul Weiss

    February 17, 2009 at 9:51 pm

    I followed these instructions twice and they worked each time. What problems did you encounter.

     
  5. michaelL

    March 7, 2009 at 2:18 am

    I have the same problem

    Unknown partition table signature…

    and article should read Grub –no-curses (for Ubuntu 8.10)

     
  6. Steve

    April 9, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    This worked great! Just remember to put two dashes before no-curses as well.

     
  7. Paul Weiss

    April 20, 2009 at 11:09 pm

    I did enter two dashes. A WordPress bug converts two dashes into one dash.

     
  8. in4man

    June 25, 2009 at 7:20 pm

    Thnak you! Thank you i tried but it something bug in live Mint-Linux 7.0, that apt command doesnt get corerct attribut . Lolmao

     
  9. MaxBlade

    June 27, 2009 at 5:10 pm

    Hello i am experiencing problems when I enter the command “sudo mount nvidia_aefedddh1 /target” it gives me the message “mount: mount point /target does not exist”

     
  10. LinuxGreenhorn

    October 20, 2009 at 9:02 pm

    Hey, so I’m new to linux and have an extra machine lying around that I ran windows on. It kept crashing and having networking problems with my other windows box so now I would like to try linux. Mint seemed like a good choice so I saw your tutorial and gave it a shot. My machine I’m attempting to install linux on uses BIOS raid, or as it seems to be called in the linux world, Fake Raid. I completely reformatted both HDs and re created a raid array in the bios. Everything in your tutorial went great until around step 10. I coppied the /dev/mapper/control file using “sudo cp -R control ” and it coppied over fine. I then tried “sudo fdisk ” and get the following error:

    last_lba(): I don’t know how to handle files with mode 20640
    Unable to read

    I have looked around online but can not find any real answers as to how to fix this, or as to even why this is really happening. I guess this all stems from my lack of understanding of what is really being done in these guide steps. I hope someone can help me out…

    Thanks

     
  11. online

    February 7, 2010 at 2:23 pm

    Any help setting up the above on linux mint Helena 8 would be nice

     
  12. online

    February 9, 2010 at 12:12 am

    hmm…. I think I actually got RAID0 running on linix mint 8.
    I’ll try to retrace my steps and if I can confirm this I’ll post it.

     

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