Background:
I am trying to install on an ASUS Crosshair Formula II, AMD2+ 64 bit Motherboard. This mother board uses an Nvidia SATA controller that can run RAID hard drives. Currently I have 4 250GB hard drives connected using this feature to create a 1TB RAID 5 disk, partitioned into 2 equal parts one for the OS and one that contains nearly 327 GB of data.
When I install Fedora 9 on this hard drive, the installation does not see the RAID as a contiguous partitioned hard drive. Thinking that Linux had to be installed before the FAT partition with my data would be recognized, I allowed the disk druid formatted the partitions it needed and installed. After install the system reboots, at this time, I got an error saying that the hard drive has unreadable format and the hard drive was empty. I luckily had a backup of my data. I can allow Fedora to set up its own RAID, but this does not solve my desire to have the reliability of RAID5 to safegard my data.
I did some research and found that the Nvidia controller is not a true RAID hardware controller and is actually a "softRAID" controller. Apparently there is an error within DMRAID or FAKERAID that leads to a RAID45 error. A module within DMRAID or FAKERAID has changed to RAID456 yet the parent program still refers to it as RAID45, thus causing the failure because DMRAID or FAKERAID cannot find RAID45.
During my research for a solution to this problem, I have found that there exist a patch (
http://people.redhat.com/heinzm/ ) that theoretically solves this problem, but you have to create a custom build kernel in order to implement it. This is beyond my skill. I have search the web looking for a Fedora ISO that may have this patch already installed, but I cannot find one. I have downloaded the beta Fedora 10 and tried to install this version, but it appears that the problem persists.
Queries:
Is there an existing 64 bit ISO of Fedora that addresses this issue? If so, where can I download it?
If there is not an ISO, if I hire someone to create one for me that implements this patch, what happens when I update after installation? Is it possible that kernel updates will undo the patch?
Lastly, I know that Fedora 10 is still in Beta, but I searched anyway and I cannot find any documentation concerning this issue. Will this issue be addressed so that people using "softRAID" motherboards can use Fedora10?
I'm looking forward to hearing from you concerning this issue.
Linear Mode
