ASUS M2N-MX RAID support?

Dare

Dare

I'm currently thinking about increasing data storage safety, so I bought exact the same disk which I am using currently and thinking about making a hardware RAID1 (mirroring?), but I'm new to this. My motherboard seems to support it as per its specification, but I don't know if it is supported in system.
[CMD="sudo"]uname -r[/CMD]
Code: 
FreeBSD lucyfer 9.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE #0: Tue Jan  3 07:15:25 UTC 2012     
root@obrian.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

What do I need to make it work? As I understand RAID1 is physical mirroring, so will the data be populated as I will connect new disk through the cable and turn this feature in BIOS on or I will be needed to make a mirror by myself using third party software like Ghost? If so, do I need after then install any driver to make it working on the system?
 
Back up to an external drive first, as the RAID may overwrite things already on the disk when you create it. Motherboard RAID like that can have advantages, like being able to automatically boot from either drive if one fails. See graid(8) for the FreeBSD driver that most likely supports it.

Software RAID 1 is another option, with gmirror(8). This has advantages also, the big one being that it does not tie the system to a specific motherboard RAID controller but will work on any motherboard. See the Handbook: RAID1 - Mirroring.
 
wblock@,

Thanks for your helpful answer, but it's still not clear for me enough. I'd love to get it working without loosing any data especially that I don't have a spare disk to backup all config files and rest of important stuff like pages, databases, etc... Backing it up would require for me much time seeking through all possible config files and there's always possibility to overlook something.

So there isn't any possibility to actually let Bios make a clone on clean disk and then just load it on RAID? I think best option for be would be described here: geom manual page (Section 20.4.3), right?
 
Both BIOS and GEOM RAIDs use some space on disk to store metadata. It means that it may be a problem to create RAID1 volume from the existing data disk if its last sectors are somehow occupied. For example, with GPT partitioning the last sector is always busy by the backup partition table. With MBR partitioning situation can be easier, but it still may need some care. About creating RAID volume via BIOS you should consult your motherboard manual.

Backup is first advised step for any significant system reconfiguration. If you are doing something potentially dangerous and for the first time, that step is close to mandatory.
 
The Handbook section in post #2 shows how to make a mirror out of an existing drive and one new drive. There still needs to be a backup first. It only takes one tiny problem to lose data. It sounds like you don't have a backup already, which is dangerous. A mirror will not help that, if you accidentally delete a file it will happily remove it from all the drives in the mirror.
 
I've managed to make this working after backuping /etc, /usr/local/etc, /var/www and /home and installing 9.1 where in Release Notes I've spotted that gmirror is enabled by default, yay! Now I'm struggling with an issue - I've made also all databases backup using [cmd="mysqldump"]-uroot -p --all-databases[/cmd] and after installing new system with mysql I've tried to recover it but it removed the mysql table. Now I've made myself exports of needed tables separately. How I can reinstall mysql5-server completly? When I do make reinstall databases aren't pruned and recreated.
 
Please start a new thread for questions that are not mentioned in the thread title. MySQL people will probably not be reading this thread.
 
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