Creating Vinum objects on Hardware raided disks

[David Dooley]

Hi,

My problem is that I cannot create vinum objects on a Promise TX200 ATA raid
device. 

The system is Dual P450 PIII on a Asus motherboard with 512MB RAM, 2
9GB SCSI drives as my boot devices. 

I have installed a Promise TX2000 ATA raid controller and attached 4 x 200GB
drives, that I have configured as a single 400GB Raid 0+1 on the controller
and the OS 'FreeBSD ball.lan.raffles-it.com 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE#1:
Fri Dec 19 19:34:25 GMT 2003' sees the drives and I can create a standard UFS
partition and mount the drive. The output from dmesg showing the probed
devices is:

ar0: 381469MB <ATA RAID0+1 array> [48630/255/63] status: READY subdisks:
 0 READY ad0: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0> [387621/16/63] at ata2-master
UDMA100          
 1 READY ad1: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0> [387621/16/63] at ata2-slave
UDMA100
 2 READY ad2: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0> [387621/16/63]at ata3-master
UDMA100 3 READY ad3: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0> [387621/16/63] at
ata3-slave UDMA100

I can create between 7 and 32 partitions using this method, depending on how I
use fdisk and disklabel, but they are fairly inflexible in terms of resizing
the partitions and i would be almost impossible to grow a file system. So I
though it might be possible to create lots of small vinum sub-disks out of my
single disk and then build plexes and volumes as and when I require them and
when I want to resize a partition, add a new sub-disk/plex to the volume and
grow the file system in to the new space.

The disklabel that is currently installed on ar0 is

# disklabel -r ar0 /dev/ar0c:
type: ESDI
disk: ar0s1
label: 
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 255
sectors/cylinder: 16065
cylinders: 48629
sectors/unit: 781240887
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
drivedata: 0 

8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  c: 781240887        0    unused        0     0        # (Cyl.    0 - 48629*)
  e: 781240887        0     vinum                       # (Cyl.    0 - 48629*)


The configuration file I used to define the drive was 

        drive bigdrive device /dev/ar0
or
        drive bigdrive device /dev/ar0e
or
        drive bigdrive device /dev/ar0s1e

and the response I got each time was

           1: drive bigdrive device /dev/ar0e
        ** 1 Can't initialize drive bigdrive: Operation not supported by
device        0 drives:
        0 volumes:
        0 plexes:
        0 subdisks:

between each invocation pf the create command I did a "resetconfig". 

Thanks for any light you can shed on this.

David 

-- 

David Dooley
dpd at raffles-it.com