no valid devices found to load ES4 RAID nVIDIA 939NF4G-SATA2 -- Fake RAID (FRAID)

[Bryan J. Smith]

Stan Smith <stan.smith at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> I want to use RAID 0 so I set up the BIOS to mirror the two SATA
> drives.
>  ...
> An error has occurred -  no valid devices were found on which to
> create new file systems. Please check your hardware for the cause
> of this problem.

_All_ -- 100% -- of mainboard ATA is _Fake_ RAID (FRAID).  It is
"dumb" ATA hardware with a 16-bit RAID BIOS and then a 32/64-bit OS
driver to reorganize the separate disks into a single volume.

Understand that _software_ driver handles the actual RAID operations
-- duplicate streams (mirroring), interleaved streams (stripe), XOR
stream (parity), etc...  And because that _software_ driver contains
3rd party licensed RAID logic, it will _never_ be GPL.

> I decided to load Windows XP to see if the hardware actually
> worked. The disk supplied with the motherboard allowed me to
> crerate a driver diskette for the SATA drives. Windows XP HOME 
> loaded without any problems, the RAID 0 worked,

Of course, because you are giving the FRAID driver to "trick" Windows
XP Home's SCSI block subsystem into organizing the separate disks
into 1 volume.

> and the ethernet card also worked. (first time!!!!)
> My question is there a linux ES4 driver available for the hard
> drives and eternet card. I have checked a lot sites with no luck.

There were previous efforts in kernel 2.4 to build a base,
vendor-independent software RAID driver (ataraid.c), and then
card-specific interfaces (e.g., hptraid for High Point Technologies,
pdcraid for Promise FastTrak, silraid for Silicon Image, etc...). 
But they were largely unreliable.

The new approach is in Device Mapper 2 (DM2) for Logical Volume
Management 2 (LVM2) which maps many FRAID (and even some true
hardware RAID -- e.g., 3Ware) volume organization so Linux's standard
software RAID logic can be used.  But most of these features of DM2
are still considered "experimental."

If you want RAID under Linux, consider:  
- MultiDisk (MD) and raidtools -- great for RAID-0 and RAID-1!
- Newer DM2 RAID additions to LVM2 (opinions vary on maturity)
- 3Ware Escalade 7000/8000 (PCI64) products for RAID-10.
- Areca ARC-11x0 (PCI-X) and ARC-12x0 (PCIe) for RAID-6.
- NetCell SR3000/5000 (PCI32/64) products for RAID-3 (RAID-XL)



-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------
I'm a Democrat.  No wait, I'm a Republican.  Hmm,
it seems I'm just whatever someone disagrees with.