I spent a few days figuring all this out from many sources and thought I would give it back to the Ubuntu community. YMMV as they say, so good luck with my 18 or so easy steps.....
My goal was to install Ubuntu 14.04 by itself on a RAID 1 array of2 HDD's using the motherboards built in RAID controller. (Fake RAID,software RAID)
Hardware: MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate mobo with intel Z87 chipset. Inteli5-4670k LGA1150, 2-WD Black WD5003AZEX S3 500G HDD's, 8GB crucialRAM.
First Part is motherboard configuration:
Configure the Intel RAID as RAID1 with 2 HD's, by doing the following (if you have a different mobo, the exact steps will be a little different, but the concepts are the same. “Where's the damn anti matter inducer?" "This? No...this!” "That or nothing.":
First, set up your BIOS by booting and hitting the Delete Keyuntil the bios is visible. In integrated peripherals, select thehard drive controller and set it to RAID. Use esc key and saveconfiguration and exit. Next, reboot and keep holding the Ctrl keyand repeatedly hitting the I (letter i) key until the intel RAIDconfiguration screen appears. If you're not quick enough, you mayneed to reboot a few times to get it to work, as it flashes by veryquickly. Use the tab & up-down arrow keys to select the 2 drivesand set them to the configuration you want. I used RAID 1. Finally,boot back to the BIOS configuration screen again and go to the bootsection and select the boot order with USB key as first and the RAID array, which will show as a single entry named Intel HDD as the second boot device. Save configuration & exit.
Second Part is software RAID configuration:
Boot the Ubuntu installation live CD/USB thumb drive whileconnected to the Internet (very important, you need toinstall packages from the repository!!!).
- When the installation boots up choose "Try Ubuntu"
- Make sure you are connected to the internet (again, crucial step)
- Open a terminal and type the following to temporarily disable dmraid and install mdadm.
Code:sudo dmraid -a nCode:sudo apt-get install mdadm
- You will be prompted with POSIX configuration, I chose No Configuration. This is a DOS type screen that you navigate in with the tab, arrow, space bar and enter keys.
- Wait for it to finish and type in the terminal to automatically recognize and set up your FakeRAID:
There is no need to reboot at this point.Code:sudo mdadm --assemble --scan
Third Part...We are now ready to start the Ubuntu installation:
- Run Install Ubuntu from the desktop icon or the top icon on the launcher.
- Choose to Install Ubuntu
- Choose to partition manually and create: 50 MB bios boot partition with bios_grub flag (reserved bios area) followed by a 200 MB EFI boot partition at the front of the drive, a swap partition of appropriate size at the end of the free space and the remaining free space as an EXT4 partition mounted as / .
- When choosing where to write the Boot-Loader - Choose the volume mounted as “biosgrub”. This is not going to work and will cause an error in the installation, but you will fix it later.
- Proceed with the installation.
- After all this, the installer will fail to write GRUB and give you a fatal error. The installation can go no further.
- Reboot using the live installation disc/USB thumb drive, connect to the Internet, install Boot Repair by opening a terminal and copy/paste the following lines one at a time followed by the enter key:
Code:sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
Code:sudo sed 's/trusty/saucy/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list
Code:sudo apt-get update
Code:sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && (boot-repair &)
- (If needed, you will find complete instructions online here.... https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair .
- Launch Boot Repair (it may launch itself at the end of the last command above) and it will guide you on fixing the boot loader and rewriting GRUB. Note that this will switch you back from mdadm to dmraid. I had to run boot repair twice to fix everything. After it's first attempt, it said grub was not installed and suggested I try again. If Boot repair has exited, rerun it by hitting the super key (windows key...sigh) and typing boot. It's icon should appear. The second attempt did it after I installed grub on all listed hard drives when the dialog to do so appeared. Use space bar up/down and tab to select different bootable devices by putting an * inside the [ ] next to the drives you want to put grub on, tab down to the ok symbol and hit enter. The only thing I didn't put grub on was the USB key the live session was running from.
- Because the initial installation failed before it could complete, reboot with the live disc/USB thumb drive again and select the option to “reinstall Ubuntu”. It may seem to stall out towards the end where it says “Restoring previously installed packages...”. It took my system about 15 minutes to clear this step, but it could take longer (over an hour) depending on your system specs and Internet connection.
- Finally, it completes and you have the option to reboot. Don't forget to take out the live disc.
- You should now be booted on the RAID on your desktop.
If someone wants to put in the experimentation time, you may be able to simplify the above, but I am just glad it worked after doing all that. I am also considering just chucking the whole install and buying a hardware RAID card, which should dramatically simplify the whole mess.
The following is optional after you have the whole thing running. There is a GUI of sorts available to control the RAID (and damn near everything else in your system), called webmin. The example I give the first link to is for controlling RAID using mdadm, I don't know if it works with dmraid. Read more about it here: http://michal.karzynski.pl/blog/2009...ui-via-webmin/
For total webmin info, look here: http://www.webmin.com/index.html
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