mdraid & dmraid, Fedora 11 & Fedora 13

[Aram J. Agajanian]

On Tue, 25 May 2010 18:51:54 -0700
Joe Christy <joe at eshu.net> wrote:

> 
> In the F13 release notes it says:
> 
> Important — Systems with Intel BIOS RAID sets
> Fedora 13 uses mdraid instead of dmraid for installation onto Intel
> BIOS RAID sets. These sets are detected automatically, and devices
> with Intel ISW metadata are recognized as mdraid instead of dmraid.
> Note that the device node names of any such devices under mdraid are
> different from their device node names under dmraid. Therefore,
> special precautions are necessary when you migrate systems with Intel
> BIOS RAID sets from operating systems or versions of operating
> systems that use dmraid. Local modifications
> to /etc/fstab, /etc/crypttab or other configuration files which refer
> to devices by their device node names will not work in Fedora 13.
> Before migrating these files, you must therefore edit them to replace
> device node paths with device UUIDs instead. You can find the UUIDs
> of devices with the blkid command.
> 
> I'm currently running F11 on a system w/ Intel BIOS RAID (1) [Lenovo 
> ThinkPad W700]  and remember problems w/ the SW raid under F10, and
> more problems w/ SW raid when I upgraded to F11.
> 
> Unfortunately, the above warning is opaque to me. How can I tell if
> my F11 uses mdraid or dmraid? I used lvm to break my single raid
> partition into separate logical partitions and would dearly love to
> keep the data on the non-system logical partitions w/o restoring from
> backups, so I'm hoping that I don't need to jump through a lot of
> hoops to do so.
> 
> 	Thanks,
> 		Joe

F8 to F11 and RHEL 5 use dmraid for BIOS RAID.  

F12 and F13 use mdraid for BIOS RAID.

I have installed Fedora onto several computers with Intel BIOS RAID
arrays and have always partitioned similarly to the way that you have
described.  Anaconda has detected the BIOS RAID array and generated the
fstab correctly in F12 and F13.  I have never used /etc/crypttab and
always do fresh installs.

You should always backup before doing an OS install, even if you are
keeping the data in some filesystems.

In F12 and F13, I have recently experienced bug # 576749.  It seems
that an mdraid resync makes the computer unresponsive.

In F13 Anaconda, BIOS RAID storage devices are found in the Advanced
Storage option.



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