From owner-freebsd-hardware Sat Nov 17 15: 4:13 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from agena.meridian-enviro.com (thunder.meridian-enviro.com [207.109.234.227]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A0CF737B417 for ; Sat, 17 Nov 2001 15:04:10 -0800 (PST) Received: from delta.meridian-enviro.com (delta.meridian-enviro.com [10.10.10.43]) by agena.meridian-enviro.com (8.11.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id fAHN49C37869; Sat, 17 Nov 2001 17:04:09 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from rand@meridian-enviro.com) Received: (from rand@localhost) by delta.meridian-enviro.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) id fAHN49Z31072; Sat, 17 Nov 2001 17:04:09 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from rand@meridian-enviro.com) X-Authentication-Warning: delta.meridian-enviro.com: rand set sender to rand@meridian-enviro.com using -f To: "E. Jordan Bojar" Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 3Ware IDE RAID References: <01Nov16.164838est.119126@gateway.intersystems.com> From: rand@meridian-enviro.com (Douglas K. Rand) Date: 17 Nov 2001 17:04:09 -0600 In-Reply-To: <01Nov16.164838est.119126@gateway.intersystems.com> ("E. Jordan Bojar"'s message of "Fri, 16 Nov 2001 16:51:58 -0500") Message-ID: <878zd5f192.fsf@delta.meridian-enviro.com> Lines: 26 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090001 (Oort Gnus v0.01) XEmacs/21.1 (Cuyahoga Valley) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Jordan> Can FreeBSD 4.4 use a the 3Ware IDE RAID mirror to boot? Yup! It is way cool! Jordan> That is, can I do a full install (partitioning and all) onto a Jordan> mirrored array and expect the machine to "just work", or do I Jordan> need some kind of boot disk as well (I recall this was the Jordan> case some time ago)? We have 6 systems with all the disks hooked up to a 3ware controller. (This excepts the CD-ROM drive. :) All work like a charm, boot fine. In fact, all installed directly from either the 4.3 or 4.4 distributions. The only thing that took me a bit to realize was the RAID-0 and RAID-10 volumes needed to be initialized, and this /really/ slows down the installation, especially newfs. One reason I didn't figure this out right away is that the front panel LED from the 3ware card doesn't show this activity, only the internal LEDs for the indvidual disks. I've fallen in to the habit of forcing a fdisk label (DOS partition table) to be written out to the disk and then just waiting, up to a few hours, for the RAID volume initialization to finish. Then I reboot and do the install again. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message