Installing FreeBSD on "fakeraid"

[submaster]

Hello everyone

In case of upgrading mail server, i decided to move on not-so-old 2xAthlon MP server. It has LSI MegaRAID 8204XLP in it and 4 HDDs. So i made RAID5 for 3 HDD and Hot-spare for 4th HDD and boot from DVD with 7.2-Release installation. And problem is - installation doesn't see ONE drive, as it must - instead i've got choice of 4 HDDs (da0, and so on) to install on.
I googled, and find out, that 8204XLP is not "hardware" raid, it's just driver-based, so mpt module sees it like ordinal SATA controller. Is there any method to make FreeBSD installation see 8204XLP as raid ? I've found some fragmentary information, saying it could be done using mfi module - but no explanation how to do it, and no confirmation that it really works

Thanks in advance

 

[tingo]

According to the man page, mfi(4) is for SAS hardware, so I doubt that would work.
But you can try to kldload the driver and see what it says.

 

[phoenix]

Try booting off an 8.0 BETA bootonly CD and see if that detects the RAID array or not. If it doesn't, then you're probably out of luck.

In that case, you'll want to configure the card as either JBOD or Single Disk (or Legacy, or whatever terminology LSI uses) where each drive is a separate unit. Basically, use the card as a standard SATA controller.

Then use software RAID support in FreeBSD (gstripe(8) for RAID0, gmirror(8) for RAID1, graid3(8) for RAID3, graid5(8) for RAID5) or use zfs(8) and the RAID facilities in ZFS.