Step 1: creating RAID set in BIOS
After powering up the system, press CTRL-I to go to the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.
- Choose create RAID-volume.
- Choose a name, for example: diskset. Don’t use numbers, some installation scripts in Ubuntu check for numbers in the disknames to determine if its a disk or a partition. I made the mistake to choose diskset1 as name. I wasn’t able to rename the RAID volume, so I had to start all over!
- Choose RAID10, 64k stripe-size.
Your RAID set is now created.
Step 2: install Microsoft Windows
This step is pretty straight-forward. Vista recoqnizes the RAID set and displays it as 1 single disk. During the install, create a partition for Windows and leave enough diskspace for Linux.
Step 3: Ubuntu Intrepid 64bit
This is the hard part. It looks like there is a bug in the Ubuntu version of libparted. Due to this bug, the RAID10 disk is not visible during the installation. I followed the following steps to succesfully install Linux:
- Boot using the normal live/installation disk.
- Open a terminal:
sudo su –
apt-get update
apt-get install dmraid
- Now check for your RAID disk. It should be visible in /dev/mapper. You will also see 2 RAID0 disks. These are just 2 parts of the RAID10 disk.
ls -l /dev/mapper/
root@ubuntu:~# ls -l /dev/mapper/
crw-rw—- 1 root root 10, 60 2008-12-21 15:54 control
brw-rw—- 1 root disk 254, 2 2008-12-21 15:54 isw_bfgggbebhf_diskset
brw-rw—- 1 root disk 254, 1 2008-12-21 15:54 isw_bfgggbebhf_diskset-0
brw-rw—- 1 root disk 254, 3 2008-12-21 15:54 isw_bfgggbebhf_diskset1
brw-rw—- 1 root disk 254, 0 2008-12-21 15:54 isw_bfgggbebhf_diskset-1
- diskset is the RAID10 device.
- diskset-0 and diskset-1 are the RAID0 disks.
- diskset1 is the Windows partition on the RAID10 disk.
The installation script uses the command parted_devices to get all available devices, but parted_devices doesn’t show the RAID10 disk. We have to patch libparted to solve this problem. It seems that an Ubuntu-specific patch is causing the trouble.
Thanks a million for this post. Worked like a charm for my RAID 0 setup for dual boot Vista/Ubuntu 9.10.