I had 2 drives formatted to raid in bios but the system doesn't recognize them as a usable drive. I went into disks and gparted . Not knowing what i'm really looking at I can tell that it sees the 2 drives , both have a warning triangle over them. I can usually figure out what to do but I don't see anything that I want to try.
It looks like they need to be formated but I thought that the bios already did that when it striped them. Just need to know what to tell gparted to do.
Thanks
Hello Michael:
When you set up RAID in the BIOS of most consumer motherboards, it isn’t a pure hardware RAID like you’d find in a high-end server; it’s a firmware-assisted software RAID.
Linux (and Zorin OS) often sees the two physical drives individually instead of the single "striped" volume because it hasn't been told to assemble them using the dmraid or mdadm drivers. The warning triangles you see in GParted are likely there because the OS detects RAID metadata on the drives but doesn't know how to mount the "broken" array.
Most Linux experts suggest turning off RAID in the BIOS (set it back to AHCI) and letting Zorin handle the striping (RAID 0) via software. It is more reliable, easier to recover if your motherboard dies, and performs just as fast.
Try this:
In BIOS: Set SATA mode to AHCI and delete the RAID array.
In Zorin: Open Disks.
Select one drive, click the three-dot menu, and select Format Disk. Repeat for the second drive.
Once they are "Free Space," you can use the mdadm tool or the Disks utility to create a new "Combined" partition.
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i dont have the mdadm tool. I have heard of it. searched for it but never found it.
Does this help?
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You could install it with sudo apt install mdadm in Live Mode to use it.
the command line worked, it looks like it installed but where? I don't know, how to find it or run it, I don't know that either. Nothing shows up in utilities or tools.
also i formatted both drives but one of them is formatted for use in the linux ext4 while the other one just says free space. the second disk asked completely different questions when I went to format it.
I went to duck duck go and asked it how to us mdadm and I could follow it until step 2 and then it might as well be in chinese. Take no offense to this but I just want an app that sees my disks and asks, do I want raid on these disks that are checked? Which version of raid?
Everything I see as far as commands go on disks and gparted leaves me with more questions than answers.
I'm sorry to ask so many questions but I just don't have any other choice. If this was a windows 10 os, I would have been done long ago without ever having to ask any questions about it. Is there an app at the respository that makes it that easy? I would actually pay money for a disk utility app that did most common operations with check boxes and clicks.
"Mastering Linus mdadm: A Comprehensive Guide" is a button! I'm sorry, I'm 55 not 25 , I don't look at a screen and assume that everything is automatically a button. If it isn't underlined or say click here I will probably miss it.
sudo mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
I made it this far and i am not really sure that I accomplished anything from what came back in the terminal. A really common thing that confuses me is when there are things in the command line that don't make any sense. example:
sudo mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
What am I supposed to do when I see the line between the words scan and sudo in the above command line? At this rate I think that this topic is going to run very very long. I'm going to try and contact zorin support for an easier solution because i'm getting a headache.This is dash dash (- twice) and specifies that word is a flag.
A single dash
is a flag in short format. While Double Dash Flags tend to be a full word and human readable, -a is shortened for all as -l is shortened for list.
In the middle here, the vertical line is pipe typed with shift+backslash - and it pipes or connects and redirects a command action.
In the command above, you see tee, so a Pipe plus tee means that the output from scan is piped, then split by tee.
You actually do not need to know or memorize all of that. Copy and paste the command is technically all you need. Linus Torvalds does not know them all, either.
Let's say you are a specialized Ford Mechanic. You do this for years.
Then one day, are tasked to repair a Nissan car.
The Ford truck is not easier to work on, just more familiar to you. You know the steps, SAE, you know general placement and specs, torque values and thread pitches.
You will struggle with the unfamiliar Nissan with its metric sizes, finer thread pitches and different components and their placement. Until...
It starts to become familiar. Soon, the Nissan's are easy, too.
Then a Puegeot rolls in.
Try to avoid overthinking, like test anxiety. If you get an error, stop to relay or examine it, but other than that - if you see no errors, proceed along the steps of the guide instead of thinking there was a mystery to solve.
I get errors all the time when I paste in commands. This leads to anxiety because now I know that only half of something was done and it may not allow the rest of it to work. I am trying the gparted / disks route but that doesn't seem to be working either. I am not finding the commands that say combine disks. I am not certain about what kind of format to use. They are both currently ext4. I was told that they need to say free space. No partition? I don't see any way to fix this.
Are you performing all commands from LiveUSB and not your bare metal install?
I just watched a video and it said that I need to download drivers for linux to make raid work. disks utility has no option to combine disks that I can see.
That is correct. You have to use command line and then install the system if that is what I read correctly.
I went to duck duck go and successfully set up raid0. I would suggest using the Ai and be prepared to send it pictures. You can only send 5.
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