I'm recycling an old machine and trying to get R5E50 going on it. The problem is I've only got two old 160GB SATA drives to work with, and I'm trying to figure out how to get the most space useable. I looked at LVM but the setup seemed messy and there were lots of mentions about not being able to use it on the boot drive, which completely defeats the purpose when you only have 2 drives.

So I figured I'd throw them into a RAID on the nforce's controller and try it that way. I've spent the last couple days reading about dmraid but I don't think I'm any closer to figuring out how to get it to install to the RAID. Most of the instructions I can find on the subject assume you already (somehow) have a system up and running to compile things on etc.

Anyone know if it's even possible to get R5E50 installed on this thing?

Raid will give you 160G with either a form of disk mirroring or faster access times depending on how you set it up. I don't think it will give you 320G usable space.

I believe the reference that you can't use lvm on a boot drive actually means that you can't use lvm on a boot partition. The typical way to set up lvm is to install normally on the 160G drive, then use LVM to add the second drive to /myth (which is not on the boot partition but is where you need all the space).

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

I have RAID 0 running on my main desktop machine. This did give me the full 72G (2 36G 10K RPM WD Raptors) but I could never get Linux to boot off the set. My guess is that it can't load the RAID driver off the disk that it needs the RAID driver to read in the first place. Luckily I had another 160G drive that I created a 100M /boot partition on. Doing it that way worked like a charm.

For your setup I'd suggest creating 3 partitions on the first drive ( / swap and /myth ) then make the /myth LVM. I believe there is a howto on the wiki or look into create_lvm.sh that comes with KnoppMyth

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KnoppMyth Folding@home
How to setup F@H
F@H Stats Page

RAID0 will give 320GB space. Running RAID1 on a PVR would be pretty silly. There's got to be some way to get a driver loaded to boot from the array because it's possible under windows. I'm not sure how they manage it, if the driver just sits at a special address on the disk or what. I'm surprised there isn't a reasonably easy solution for linux given how prevalent RAID0s on onboard controllers are these days. I know more people running them than I do using single HDs.

I've been reading the LVM wiki but I'm getting conflicting reports on whether or not it's possible to use an LVM on the same drive that the system boots from. I'll have a look at create_lvm.sh but now I'm confused whether LVM works at the disk level or partition level or what.

I seem to be running into bigger problems now. I tried installing to just the first disk, did the auto-install, selected the HD, and it seemed to do everything alright. But after reboot it just comes up to a blank screen with a cursor.

After a bit of messing around, I've found if I use ide=reverse AND unplug one drive, it reboots but then gets to a point where it keeps blanking the screen, and eventually says something about "c7" respawning too fast. I haven't been able to find any help on that one yet.

Oh and here's a fun one. I tried putting the 2nd drive back in and using ide=reverse, and it didn't work. So I figured hang on, maybe I need to install to the second disk if I'm using reverse, and so I tried. Guess what? I select sdb in the menu, it installs to sda anyway. Good job there. I tried it twice to make sure I wasn't seeing things, but no, both the confirmation of "this will overwrite everything on sda!" and the copying file dialogs say sda, even though I selected the other disk.

So, any idea how to fix the c7 problem?

Hi,

You need to make a fix in /etc/X11/xorg.conf as you don't have the correct driver. There is a quick get you going post to use Driver "vesa" to get everything setup. Once all is basically tweaked, you can then do some serious research for the proper driver but in the mean time you should have a usable machine.

Mike

Well I changed it from "ati" to "vesa" and it switches to graphical mode at least, and does a whole bunch of configuration. But I'm trying to figure out why the ati driver didn't work. I'm running an Asus x1600XT, which is not the most uncommon card on the planet.