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From: Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
To: Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org>
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References: <47A732BC.2090204@ariel.ru> <200802041115.50984.josh@tcbug.org>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Leonid Satanovsky <leosat.it@ariel.ru>
Subject: Re: SATA raid controller on Asustek's P5M2-M
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> My experience with the onboard BIOS RAID of various motherboards has been
> horrific.  I'd suggest one of two paths, depending on the RAID configuration
> you're going for.

you well called it "BIOS RAID". because it is actually completely normal 
hardware, just with crappy software RAID in BIOS.

gmirror, gstripe is software RAID, gconcat is useful too, all is much 
better and is portable (you may move that disks to any other controller).

and you may gmirror partition, not whole drive.

for booting it's best to create small boot partition.
as it's not much space i usually create boot partition on every disk so it 
can boot with disks swapped, missing etc.

it's just important to make boot partition as a.

example of my /boot/install.sh which i run every time i change anything in 
/boot on 6 disk system:

#!/bin/sh
for x in ad10a ad12a ad14a ad16a ad18a ad20a ;do
  newfs -m 0 -i 32768 -b 16384 -f 2048 /dev/$x
  mount /dev/$x /root/mnt-boot
  cp -pR /boot /root/mnt-boot
  umount /root/mnt-boot
done


replace /root/mnt-boot with something else if prefered.


please don't ask me how to do it with sysinstall. the answer is impossible 
or very difficult like temporary install without gmirror, boot partitions 
and copying.

best way is to use liveCD/DVD and do manual install.


is there anywhere manual-install-howto? if not i could write it having a 
bit of time.