integrated SATA RAID controller on Intel server board SE7520bd2

[Gayn Winters]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Olga Zenkova
> Sent: Sunday, July 03, 2005 3:42 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: integrated SATA RAID controller on Intel server 
> board SE7520bd2
> 

Regarding multiple posts on the current ata driver in 5.4 not supporting
hardware mirroring with the Intel ICH5R and ICH6R chips ...

My 2 cents is to use gmirror for software mirroring as is described in

http://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/24/freebsd-howto-gmirror-system/

There is another method, which I have also used, that has the advantage
of not needing to go into Fixit mode using the 5.4 boot CD (hence it can
be executed remotely); however, it takes more typing and more reboots.
It is described here:

http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/

If you use the latter, note that Ralf uses ATA drives ad0 and ad1, while
your SATA configuration will probably come up as ad4 and ad6.  You need
to make the transliteration 0 --> 4 and 1 --> 6 very carefully,
especially in the line for the boot loader where ad(1,a) --> ad(6,a).

This latter paper also outlines how to mirror at the slice, rather than
the disk, level.

One final hint:  if you are playing around with gmirror on the same
disks, you can get into a situation where one attempt has left gmirror
information on the last sector of your disks.  This will confuse
gmirror, and you will have to load and use gmirror to clear it out.
Read the man pages on gmirror in any case!!!

Best of luck,

-gayn