Missing RAID volume

Ask Fedora
1

Hi Everyone,

I’m trying to get my old Fedora box running again, but I’m stuck on a missing RAID volume. Setup in BIOS and controller look good, they both show the logical volume created and working. The BIOS has a boot entry to boot off the LV.

In Fedora, I don’t see a device representing the LV available anywhere. The individual disks are showing, but I remember they did that in the past as well. Previously i had /dev/sd[c-e] as well as something like /dev/umapper… which represented the LV, but now the LV is nowhere to be found.

I don’t see any errors or other problems in the logs, though I’m not entirely sure what to be looking for. I’d appreciate some ideas on how to resolve this so I can use the LV.

The controller is a Marvell 88SE9172 chip on a GA-99FXA-UD3 (rev 4.0) motherboard. Please let me know if there’s any further information which would help.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

2

There are 2 different parts to what you have described.
Software raid functionality can be determined by the output of cat /proc/mdstat and if it shows the raid device as active that part is handled.

Hardware raid OTOH is different so that may not work for you.

The second part is the lvm. Does the system activate the lvm at all?
What does dmesg or journalctl -b -0 tell you about either the raid or the lvm config (or the individual drives)? That would be the starting point to identify the problem.

3

Thanks Jeff V,

There should be no software raid from the perspective of the OS. The controller should present the volume as a hardware device.

$ sudo cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : 
unused devices: <none>

I don’t see much about raid or lvm in dmesg, though here are a few lines:

Apr 13 09:16:49 fedora audit[1]: SERVICE_START pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=lvm2-monitor comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/systemd/systemd" hostname=? addr=? terminal=? res=success'

Apr 13 05:16:43 fedora kernel: ahci 0000:00:11.0: AHCI 0001.0200 32 slots 6 ports 6 Gbps 0x3f impl RAID mode
Apr 13 05:16:43 fedora kernel: ahci 0000:03:00.0: AHCI 0001.0000 32 slots 2 ports 6 Gbps 0x3 impl RAID mode

It's good that the system is reporting the controller operating in RAID mode, but besides that it just gets the devices as if it were in AHCI mode. All of the disks are showing up in Fedora as they would be in a non-raid setup, though I don't know why.
4

After disabling the Marvell controller and using the integrated AMD controller, Windows correctly shows an AMD RAID 1 SCSI Disk Device, though will not show a RAID 5 device.

Fedora continues to show single disks without a RAID device. I want to pass the RAID device through to a Windows VM, but I can’t pass the entire controller through as Fedora is booting off of it as well.

I’m not sure what else I can do on this, which is especially frustrating considering it was working correctly in the past.

5

Hi.
Did you solve your problem ?
I’m facing exactly the same one with the brand new machine I just built, with Fedora 36 and 2 8Gb HDDs in RAID 1. Apparently, everything ok with the Motherboard.
It’s weird because I have another computer, also with Fedora 36 (but with another configuration) and 2 6 Gb HDDs and everything works perfectly.
Just in case, I have found the following link related to this problem, but I don’t know if it’s the answer and how to do it :

https://www.linux.org/threads/solved-asus-raid-controller-not-detected-in-newer-linux-version.33595/

Thank and have a good day !

6

What it seems both of you are missing is that the raid control built into the mobo & bios is ‘intended’ as a windows raid manager and initially many drives in RAID mode could not be even “seen” by fedora. Some can be managed by linux, many cannot, but none are capable of more than raid 1 AFAIK.

Using mdadm with fedora allows full control of all versions of raid (levels 0, 1, 5, 6, & 10) but hardware control of the type provided on some mobos is very limited. Linux does not have the drivers that are specifically required for bios raid and those are built into windows.