DeaconBlues
May 24th, 2008, 09:39 PM
I've been using ubuntu since Gutsy and I think it's a fantastic, erm "thing". One thing that's always annoyed me is the text-based partition manager when you first install though.
It's fine if you only have 1 hard drive, as I installed it on a mates laptop without a problem, but if you're trying to configure RAID it's horrible.
One of the main things I'd hoped the developers would improve would be to update the partitioner with Gutsy: it seems that it's exactly the same one.
I've had Hardy Heron working from install with the following setup:
100Gb root : 2 x 50Gb RAID0 partitions
200Gb home : 2 x 100Gb RAID0 partitions
300Gb spare drive used for music and TV shows - older SATA 1 drive.
I've been messing about with dual-booting recently and I thought I'd start from scratch but I couldn't get the partition utility to get me back to how I used to have my drives.
Every time I rebooted to wipe my RAID drives (leaving my media drive intact, of course) Linux would remember the partition setup I had aborted during the previous installation!
So I thought "sod this, I WILL reset my hard-drives, Linux!": I turned on Hardware RAID on my motherboard and configured an array using my BIOS, which should theoretically wipe both hard drives (?).
Then I got an old, cracked, copy of Windows XP out which I've had for aeons and used to work fine. It picked up my hardware RAID array fine and asked me if I wanted to wipe the drives. I said "yeah" and started to install XP...
I waited until the blue XP installation screen started rapidly copying over the O/S files, thinking "get in! My master boot record/partition tables/file allocation table are surely overwritten now!" and cut the power to my PC half-way through the XP installation.
When I restarted I went back into BIOS and diabled hardware RAID, since I used to have Ubuntu working fine on my old software RAID setup, and then rebooted with the ubuntu alternate install CD in my drive.
I thought after a part install that Ubuntu would see a corrupt file system, start from scratch, and reformat the drives that I wanted to use as an array.
But no! It still saw my old RAID array!! How is this possible? I deliberately buggered my FAT and partition information on my drives and then restarted from CD!
Is there a partition table that Linux uses that Windows doesn't overwrite or something?
Specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P (flashed to beta BIOS to accommodate my new CPU)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300
RAM: 2 Gb of 667Mhz, dual channel
GPU: eVGA 8600GT
Drives:
2 x Western Digital 250Gb SATA II, which I use for RAID, identical drives -plugged into SATA ports 1 & 2 on mobo.
1 x Maxtor 300Gb SATA I for music/videos -plugged into SATA 4, I think, on mobo.
It's fine if you only have 1 hard drive, as I installed it on a mates laptop without a problem, but if you're trying to configure RAID it's horrible.
One of the main things I'd hoped the developers would improve would be to update the partitioner with Gutsy: it seems that it's exactly the same one.
I've had Hardy Heron working from install with the following setup:
100Gb root : 2 x 50Gb RAID0 partitions
200Gb home : 2 x 100Gb RAID0 partitions
300Gb spare drive used for music and TV shows - older SATA 1 drive.
I've been messing about with dual-booting recently and I thought I'd start from scratch but I couldn't get the partition utility to get me back to how I used to have my drives.
Every time I rebooted to wipe my RAID drives (leaving my media drive intact, of course) Linux would remember the partition setup I had aborted during the previous installation!
So I thought "sod this, I WILL reset my hard-drives, Linux!": I turned on Hardware RAID on my motherboard and configured an array using my BIOS, which should theoretically wipe both hard drives (?).
Then I got an old, cracked, copy of Windows XP out which I've had for aeons and used to work fine. It picked up my hardware RAID array fine and asked me if I wanted to wipe the drives. I said "yeah" and started to install XP...
I waited until the blue XP installation screen started rapidly copying over the O/S files, thinking "get in! My master boot record/partition tables/file allocation table are surely overwritten now!" and cut the power to my PC half-way through the XP installation.
When I restarted I went back into BIOS and diabled hardware RAID, since I used to have Ubuntu working fine on my old software RAID setup, and then rebooted with the ubuntu alternate install CD in my drive.
I thought after a part install that Ubuntu would see a corrupt file system, start from scratch, and reformat the drives that I wanted to use as an array.
But no! It still saw my old RAID array!! How is this possible? I deliberately buggered my FAT and partition information on my drives and then restarted from CD!
Is there a partition table that Linux uses that Windows doesn't overwrite or something?
Specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P (flashed to beta BIOS to accommodate my new CPU)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300
RAM: 2 Gb of 667Mhz, dual channel
GPU: eVGA 8600GT
Drives:
2 x Western Digital 250Gb SATA II, which I use for RAID, identical drives -plugged into SATA ports 1 & 2 on mobo.
1 x Maxtor 300Gb SATA I for music/videos -plugged into SATA 4, I think, on mobo.