NVidea Raid0 with NTFS-partitions shall be mount for reading - Hardware

Hello guys,

I am stuck with this problem for some weeks now:

I'm trying to set up a Dual-Boot-System. Both OS, WinXP and a Gnu/Linux,
shall be installed on a 76GiB-IDE-harddisk. No problem so far.

But there's still my NVidea Raid-0, which consists of two identical
HITACHI-SATA-disk à 244GiB ('/dev/sda' and '/dev/sdb'). The filesystem
of its partitions is NTFS.

I just want to mount them so I can use my data under Gnu/Linux as well.

So I tried Debian/Kubuntu/Sabayon to find out how they support RAID, but
it seems to be sth. uncared-for (at least if I don't want to create a
new raid under Linux which I can't use among Windows). At least Sabayon
showed me something under /dev/mapper/ but this was more confusing then
helping (three NVidea-sth. were shown but I couldn't see what they were
standing for) and documentation seems to be rare on this topic.

I don't blame Gnu/Linux for this. All I can say is that I love such
proprietary software designed only to work with Windows :/

btaim, I wonder if not some damn smart guy has found a way to use a
"windows"-raid among Linux and if that one could brief me in.

I prefer Kubuntu but if there's Gnu/Linux which has an /easy/
RAID-support it's quite welcome.


Regards,
Philipp


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Philipp Kretzschmar wrote:
> Hello guys,
>
> I am stuck with this problem for some weeks now:
>
> I'm trying to set up a Dual-Boot-System. Both OS, WinXP and a Gnu/Linux,
> shall be installed on a 76GiB-IDE-harddisk. No problem so far.
>
> But there's still my NVidea Raid-0, which consists of two identical
> HITACHI-SATA-disk à 244GiB ('/dev/sda' and '/dev/sdb'). The filesystem
> of its partitions is NTFS.
>
> I just want to mount them so I can use my data under Gnu/Linux as well.
>
> So I tried Debian/Kubuntu/Sabayon to find out how they support RAID, but
> it seems to be sth. uncared-for (at least if I don't want to create a
> new raid under Linux which I can't use among Windows). At least Sabayon
> showed me something under /dev/mapper/ but this was more confusing then
> helping (three NVidea-sth. were shown but I couldn't see what they were
> standing for) and documentation seems to be rare on this topic.
>
> I don't blame Gnu/Linux for this. All I can say is that I love such
> proprietary software designed only to work with Windows :/
>
> btaim, I wonder if not some damn smart guy has found a way to use a
> "windows"-raid among Linux and if that one could brief me in.
>
> I prefer Kubuntu but if there's Gnu/Linux which has an /easy/
> RAID-support it's quite welcome.
>
>
> Regards,
> Philipp
>

Sorry for the delay but I just subscribed to this group.

Windows software raid can be mounted in linux.

First create /etc/raidtab with these lines:

raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level 0
nr-raid-disks 2
nr-spare-disks 0
persistent-superblock 0
chunk-size 64k

device /dev/sda1
raid-disk 0
device /dev/sdb1
raid-disk 1

Do NOT run mkraid, that'll kill your windows raid.

Next run:

raid0run -a
mount -t ntfs -o ro,umask=0222 /dev/md0 /mnt/winraid

You can put these last 2 lines in rc.local or wherever your distro puts
commands to be run at boot.

Now your windows raid set should be available at /mnt/winraid.
There are a few buts however.
First, I don't know if your nvidia raid set is a windows raid set, you
can check that in disk management.
Second, I don't know if the chunk size windows uses changes when using
very large drives.
I don't know how to check that, trial and error I suppose.
It worked for me with 2 8G ide drives on win2k and slackware 10.

Good luck, Michel,