RAID disks = PITA in more ways than one

I tried to install Centos 7 on an old PC that had Vista on it.
But installer did not detect any disks. Drove me mad for hours.
Eventually I found out this PC originally had RAID mirror on it.
One of the drives shat itself, so owner carried on using one disk,
just by deselecting RAID in BIOS, and Windows Vista would still boot.
Now when a RHEL 7 derivative linux glimpses RAID signature at start of a
hard drive, it will do a Sargeant Schultz "I see nothing".
Previous versions of Centos would tell you it was RAID a member,
but not the new 7.

On 29/09/2014 7:22 AM, wrote:
I tried to install Centos 7 on an old PC that had Vista on it.
But installer did not detect any disks. Drove me mad for hours.
Eventually I found out this PC originally had RAID mirror on it.
One of the drives shat itself, so owner carried on using one disk,
just by deselecting RAID in BIOS, and Windows Vista would still boot.
Now when a RHEL 7 derivative linux glimpses RAID signature at start of a
hard drive, it will do a Sargeant Schultz "I see nothing".
Previous versions of Centos would tell you it was RAID a member,
but not the new 7.

You should be able to replace the MBR on the partition with a non-RAID
type, without losing data.

Yousuf Khan

On Wed, 08 Oct 2014 22:13:07 -0400, Yousuf Khan wrote:

On 29/09/2014 7:22 AM, wrote:
I tried to install Centos 7 on an old PC that had Vista on it.
But installer did not detect any disks. Drove me mad for hours.
Eventually I found out this PC originally had RAID mirror on it.
One of the drives shat itself, so owner carried on using one disk,
just by deselecting RAID in BIOS, and Windows Vista would still boot.
Now when a RHEL 7 derivative linux glimpses RAID signature at start of a
hard drive, it will do a Sargeant Schultz "I see nothing".
Previous versions of Centos would tell you it was RAID a member,
but not the new 7.

You should be able to replace the MBR on the partition with a non-RAID
type, without losing data.

Write zeroes to the entire drive (use dd), acts like a low-level format,
freshens up any weak blocks too.

Example: "dd if=/dev/zero bs=4k of=/dev/sdX" where X if the drive selector.

Do this from the installer command line (Slackware can) or use a live CD.

Grant.

Yousuf Khan

On 08/10/2014 11:11 PM, Grant wrote:
On Wed, 08 Oct 2014 22:13:07 -0400, Yousuf Khan wrote:
You should be able to replace the MBR on the partition with a non-RAID
type, without losing data.

Write zeroes to the entire drive (use dd), acts like a low-level format,
freshens up any weak blocks too.

Example: "dd if=/dev/zero bs=4k of=/dev/sdX" where X if the drive selector.

Do this from the installer command line (Slackware can) or use a live CD.

Except, I thought he was trying to preserve data? What you suggest he do
will overwrite all data including metadata completely.

Yousuf Khan