Pile of Dross

Got two 250GB SATA hard disks delivered from dabs on Saturday (I’m sure I vowed never to order from them again without getting it delivered to work, but what the heck), this was to replace one in a server that died, probably after the power dropped a bit too often.

Physical installation was painless, software installation less so.

The motherboard has a PDC20376 controller, which has some sort of RAID functionality, so I configure the controller to treat the two drives a a RAID 1 mirror, download and burn the debian stable netinst image and start installation. Everything going smoothly, both disks detected….oh hang on, both disks? Surely it should only see one “disk”?
Decide to stop and retry with testing netinst image – same result, sees both disks but no mirror.

Regroup at this point by doing a web search on the controller – ahha RAID functionality not supported by the driver, disappointing, but not a death knell – this is only going to be a linux system so we can live with software raid.

So go back into controller bios and delete array. Reinstall debian testing, get to partioning, apparently its unable to create partitions on the software RAID meta-device, hum and haw for a bit before deciding I can live with one muckle partition. New problem – no swap, realise that RAID 1 mirroring swap is pointless so repartition giving 1 GB swap on each disk and RAID 1 mirroring rest of disks. Rest of installation painless from then on, until system gets to point it needs to reboot.

System spits out CD, powers down, powers back up, does usual BIOS check stuff and then ….. nothing, not even an insert system disk and press a key prompt. Have moment of inspiration and go into RAID controller setup and create two RAID 0 arrays, each containing one disk, set the first to be bootable and then reboot the system. Success! The system happily boots and does some more setup and finally lands me at a shell. Do a cat /proc/mdstat to check raid is okay – informs me that array is unclean and is resyncing, slightly worrying, but assume a shutdown somewhere wasn’t clean and leave it, resync completes fine. Decide to reboot system as a further check, all okay – array comes back up clean.

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