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I have my very first Xeon server computer.

It has two disks in (FakeRAID) RAID1.

The BIOS of the RAID controller says the status is Normal.

But, I would like to know if there is a way to check from the system-side, that everything is doing fine. Can I do that? I am on Linux Mint.

# blkid

/dev/sda1: UUID="6042-870C" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sda2: UUID="2ef42e6f-4987-46e5-aca9-872fd70a9f9e" TYPE="ext2" 
/dev/sda3: UUID="Oz0elc-zUuh-BAK1-i19b-RZZU-YREm-DxVaNi" TYPE="LVM2_member" 
/dev/sdb1: UUID="6042-870C" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sdb2: UUID="2ef42e6f-4987-46e5-aca9-872fd70a9f9e" TYPE="ext2" 
/dev/sdb3: UUID="Oz0elc-zUuh-BAK1-i19b-RZZU-YREm-DxVaNi" TYPE="LVM2_member" 
/dev/mapper/mint--vg-root: UUID="98a7a4a2-6e71-4aa9-ab48-5c4fc619c321" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/mapper/mint--vg-swap_1: UUID="b62721cf-7b54-4400-92f0-f8f776566c99" TYPE="swap"
Vlastimil Burián
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2 Answers2

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RAID controllers present a virtual disk to the system that looks like a single disk to the operating system but is actually the array made up of multiple disks. Unless there is special support for managing the RAID controller in the operating system, the OS cannot see or check the component disks. You will have to verify the RAID array using features provided by the RAID controller itself.

Since you don't seem to have much confidence in the BIOS RAID controller (you call it "fake"), you might want to consider disabling it altogether so that the OS sees the individual actual disks and can manage them. You can then set up Linux software RAID with mdadm.

Celada
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  • FakeRAID is an existing term that indicates a type of RAID implemented by the motherboard firmware offloaded to the host CPU without a dedicated RAID controller. – davide Mar 15 '23 at 09:30
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Approach

I have since found, that I can simply plug only one drive into the controller. Which I did, with the following result:

  1. The first drive booted fine with every file in place.

  2. The second drive did not boot at all. I inspected what it contained, and there was an old Windows installation.

Conclusion

Having this experience, FakeRAID is probably not as reliable as using a pure software solution like Linux mdadm.

I honestly do not know what caused this total non-functioning FakeRAID, but the result stands for itself.

Vlastimil Burián
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