Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 19:48:05 -0800 From: Wally! <wally@hotwally.com> To: <freebsd-doc@freebsd.org>, <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Installing Mylex RAID DAC960 with FreeBSD Message-ID: <B68BA775.342%wally@hotwally.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
This is a summary of an experience I just had installing a RAID card in a FreeBSD server. It may be useful for anyone else attempting the same. I was building a generic Intel box for use as a corporate mail-server. Since I wanted some level of back-up onboard (fault-tolerance) I decided to install a RAID. The raid was scrounged from parts on Ebay.com and included two Seagate 9.1 GIG SCSI drives and a Mylex Acceleraid 150 with the DAC960 raid controller. I installed the RAID card into the ATX case, along with the two drives and ran a SCSI cable between the three units. I checked over the excellent documentation at the www.mylex.com site and downloaded and read the appropriate .PDF manual. Though new to RAID, the manuals are good though tech-heavy... At power-up, my motherboard's BIOS recognized the presence of the RAID card. And displayed the "DAC960" alerts onscreen. The first thing I did was to hit "Alt-M" which opened a GUI that allowed me to set the raid card's BIOS. This may be a new idea for some, to have to deal with both your motherboard BIOS and the RAID card BIOS, but both need to be set correctly. The options on the RAID should be: BIOS ENABLED 2 GB Disc Geometry CD-ROM Boot enabled What these choices mean is that the BIOS on the controller card is turned on. It also means that once you've installed FREEBSD the BIOS will look in the first 2GB for the OS to boot from. And CD-ROM BOOT ENABLED is necessary if you are installing from a FreeBSD install CD. Now, re-start and when you see the DAC960 alerts, hit "Alt-R." This starts a GUI that allows you to begin the configuration of your raid, which supports up to 10 drives. If you have questions here see the Mylex documentation. I only had two drives so I defined my two drives as a "pack" and enabled them as a "system drive" and also chose options of "Write-back" which gives a bit better performance at the expense of loss of any cached data if power failed. With two drives I could only define this array as a RAID 1, which basically means each drive was mirroring the other with identical data and I could not lose anything unless both crapped out. Next I went on to install FreeBSD from CD-ROM (this process is covered in depth elsewhere, i.e. Greg Lehey's book) Freebsd should work with any Mylex drive if you are using 4.1.1 or newer releases of FreeBSD. Mike Smith has noted FreeBSD 4.2 will support the newer Mylex products. NOTE: In setting up the Mylex BIOS, if the setting is to "8GB Disk geometry" you get a "missing operating system" message at reboot. Resetting the BIOS should allow it to boot, but now you are on thin ice. Best to go back and do these steps overif you want to sleep easy. That's all 4 now. - Wally wally@hotwally.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?B68BA775.342%wally>