Booting FreeBSD-8.0-RELEASE DVD destroyed my VIA RAID array

R

RalfvdEnden

Hello,

Last week I was testing a freshly burned bootable FBSD-8.0 DVD on my workstation. Everything looked fine until I rebooted the machine.

The BIOS spat the following error at me:
Fatal Error Occured,Raid relationship and Content of all hdds will be DESTROIED!!! --------------------------- Continue(C)?
Click to expand...

The only way to get it to boot again was to continue (press 'C'), which resulted in two separate disks. Once WinXP was started again, I used the VIA tool to create a new array and sync it, but the partition had been lost and data recovery tools were needed to copy files to another disk.

It seems the bootloader overwrites some critical memory locations in effect wiping RAID status. I've had similar issues with a different system using the 7.1-RELEASE bootloader, but those were fixed in 7.2-RELEASE.

Please advice on how to avoid this mess.

Thanks in advance.

My system specs:
AMD64 3400+
2048MB RAM
ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard (latest BIOS available)
Maxtor 160Gb on the Promise RAID interface using IDE mode
2x Western Digital 250Gb on the VIA RAID interface
 
I even didn't know FreeBSD is supposed to be compatible with Windows software RAID. Are you saying FreeBSD-7.2 was able to handle it?
 
I assume you're using V-RAID provided by the VIA south bridge and not the software RAID provided by Windows.

Normally, no OS should be able to overwrite the RAID information so I'm not sure what could have happened. If you're absolutely sure that this problem didn't appear with 7.2 it might help to find out the differences between 7.1/8.0 and 7.2. I believe there was a disk driver change in 8.0 but I can't recall right now what has changed (was it ata(4) being replaced by cam(4)?).
 
I've booted 6.3-RELEASE as well which I think shows the same behaviour. Will try to confirm this tonight.

The other issue I mentioned is described in this thread: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1519

And yes... I'm using HW RAID. Software RAID is scary.

I want to use this machine with FreeBSD in the near future, so a fix would be great. If nothing else works I'll try swapping the RAID array to the Promise controller and the bootdisk to the VIA one.
 
RalfvdEnden said:
And yes... I'm using HW RAID. Software RAID is scary.
Click to expand...
For me it's the other way around. At least with software raid I can get it working on any machine.

Anyway, if you are using hardware raid make sure you pick ar0 when installing instead of ad0 or da0.
 
RalfvdEnden said:
And yes... I'm using HW RAID. Software RAID is scary.
Click to expand...
You didn't mention you have hardware RAID.
Maxtor 160Gb on the Promise RAID interface using IDE mode
2x Western Digital 250Gb on the VIA RAID interface
Click to expand...
These are both software, you have a third controller in that machine?
 
Whoops. I just realized you think of your VIA as hardware RAID.

Hardware RAID presents the array to the OS as a single drive. There is no way OS could "see" separate hard drives.

Software RAID is managed by OS. Gives lots of flexibility because admin can build RAID arrays from partitions instead of drives.

Fakeraid is software RAID which stores it's configuration in BIOS, so it can be used at an early booting stage, also operating system compatible with it can load and configure their software RAID automatically. This is what Windows does and Red Hat dmraid does.
Generally this type of software RAID does not make any sense (it has worst features of software RAID and limitations of hardware RAID. It should be ignored.
 
Speedy said:
You didn't mention you have hardware RAID.

These are both software, you have a third controller in that machine?
Click to expand...

I always assumed onboard RAID controllers were HW RAID and stuff like gvinum SW RAID. My guess is the controllers do fakeRAID then.

Still... booting FBSD from DVD should leave my array intact no matter what kind of RAID I use.
 
Well, my last Windows died in 2003 and all this fakeraid stuff is addressed to Windows users so I cannot say I'm proficient to talk about it.
Anyway, I do know FreeBSD used to be rather ignorant when it comes to using BIOS, for instance earlier versions ignored BIOS and named drives by their connection. I.e. first IDE master was ad0 regardless of BIOS boot order and so on. I did not witness what happened in your PC, my wild guess is FreeBSD took this fakeraid setting for corrupted data and "corrected" it.
 
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