RAID support for Highpoint RocketRaid

[Friendly dog]

Hi,

I am a newbie in Linux, installed it recently and have a problem with my RAID being properly recognized.
Please bear with me while I describe the issue, it is like this:

I have an old home computer:

ASUS P3B533
Pentium 4 Northwood 3.06GHz dual thread
2GB RAM
Radeon 9600 AGP
3COM 905 Ethernet card
Highpoint RocketRaid 1740 SATA controller
3 hard drives: an 80GB IDE MAXTOR and two 1.5TB SATA WD green

The old OS is Windows XP 32 bit PRO SP3, installed on the 80GB IDE drive.
With the intention of turning it into a sort of storage server for music and movies I added few months ago two new SATA drives of 1.5TB each and a SATA controller HIGHPOINT ROCKETRAID 1740 as the mb is too old to have SATA.
I organized the SATA disks as one mirrored RAID of 500GB for the important files, using a chunk of 500GB from each SATA drive. The remaining 1000GB of each drive was turned into JBOD, so in the end I have:

--500GB mirror raid
--1TB JBOD 0
--1TB JBOD 1

This is working nicely, with no problem, under Win XP.

Then I decided to install LINUX as well. I chose LINUX MINT 8 KDE main edition, made a CD, tried it then installed it on the 80GB IDE disk.
I resized the windows partition to make room for LINUX (5GB SWAP and 20GB EXT4).

Everything worked smooth, no error messages, and it is running fine now with one exception: the RAID.

In "File browser" I see listed the three physical drives I have (80G IDE and two 1.5T SATA), the SATA disks both under the same name of "RAID500" which is how I named the 500GB mirrored raid. No mention anywhere of the JBODs. It does not see the two JBOD of 1 GB each at all while the mirrored 500GB RAID is seen as two separate disks of 500GB with identical content, instead of one (I know that the mirror RAID actually involves two partitions but I should see one only, the other being the backup).

The "PALIMPSEST DISK UTILITY" lists the two 1.5TB SATA drives more accurate as each drive containing two partitions, a 500GB NTFS named RAID500 (correct) and a 1000GB one of unallocated space!!
I assume this is why I can't access the JBODs, because they are considered "unallocated".

How can I correct this?

Here is the result of lspci:

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/ Increased knowledge will help you now. \
\ Have mate's phone bugged. /
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{~._.~}
( Y )
()~*~()
(_)-(_)
stefan@3 ~ $ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845 845 [Brookdale] Chipset Host Bridge (rev 11)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82845 845 [Brookdale] Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 11)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600]
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600] (Secondary)
02:03.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 10)
02:0c.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 08)
02:0c.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! Game Port (rev 08)
02:0d.0 SCSI storage controller: HighPoint Technologies, Inc. RocketRAID 1740 (rev 02)
02:0e.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 6c)
stefan@3 ~ $


The lspci -vvnn results in this:

02:0d.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: HighPoint Technologies, Inc. RocketRAID 1740 [1103:1740] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device [11ab:11ab]
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
Latency: 32, Cache Line Size: 128 bytes
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 21
Region 0: Memory at bd800000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)
Region 2: I/O ports at 9800
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: sata_mv
Kernel modules: sata_mv


I did not use mint4win and the Linux I installed was LINUX MINT 8 HELENA KDE main edition.


Suspecting a possible driver problem I went online to search.
HIGHPOINT website offers RAID software and drivers for Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, SuSe both Novell and open, DEBIAN and UBUNTU but not for MINT.
Could I use the UBUNTU driver and RAID management software? if YES then HOW?
Or it is not a driver issue and I should try something else? I am afraid of screwing up my files with my lack of LINUX knowledge.
Please help!!http://forums.linuxmint.com/posting.php?mode=post&f=90#

Best regards,
Stefan, Friendly dog

[Jay514]

You are talking about Hardware raid which may supported by the hardware MFG. I would contact them first, here =http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/main.htm

If they do not offer support for Linux, you may have to compile your own driver, or search other forums for your hardware.
Have a good day,
Jay514