[gentoo-amd64] How to install to a RAID set?

[Peter Humphrey]

Well, here's a pretty kettle of fish, and no mistake.

Having had this dual-Opteron box for over two years with just plain IDE
disks, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and plug in a couple of
SATAs. So I did. The motherboard has a VIA chipset with what turns out to be
firmware RAID, though I had thought in my innocence that anything in the
chipset would be hardware - hah! Windows drivers for the interface are
supplied, but apparently Linux kernels need libata compiled in and dmraid
installed. Gentoo 2006.0 installation CD has both, so I should be ready to
go.

So I plugged the drives in and started exploring (they're 2 x 200 GB Maxtor
SATA disks). After many attempts I now have a new WinXP installation on the
new RAID-0 set, and all looks fine there. But after innumerable attempts and
much hair tearing I still have no trace of Gentoo. I've eventually
discovered that I need to pass "dmraid=X" to the installer at CD-boot time,
but the instructions are both wrong and unhelpful in telling me what X is. I
did manage to read "man dmraid" (though not print it - anyone know how to
print Linux man pages on a Windows box?) from which it seemed I needed an
-ay paramter, thus:

gentoo dodmraid=-ay

The instructions say to enclose the parameter in quotes, but when I did that
it complained Unknown ""-ay". Omitting the quotes enabled it to connect to
the array (that isn't the word, but I'm not at that screen at the moment)
and give every appearance of knowing what it's doing. But then when I run
fdisk -l I see two 200GB disks /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, not the single 400GB
disk I expect. Clearly, installing to /dev/sda isn't going to get me very
far - not only will it not be the RAID array I want, but I dare say it'll
break the array that the BIOS has created and WinXP is happily using.

I've googled all over the place, looking for clues. That's right - I don't
have any ;-(

Can anyone here help out? Even knowing the format of the name dmraid expects
for an existing array would help, but I can't find anything anywhere.

--
Rgds
Peter.


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