[colug-432] Firmware raid ( also known as fake raid )

[Vince Herried]

The last few kernel's on Fedora F17 didn't support my raid 1.
I opened a bugzilla on it.  Some one else jumped in with similar problems
on Fedora F18.  F17 reached end of life in July.  The bug guys  closed my
problem with won't fix.

When you try to run the bad kernels it messed up the raid which caused it
to rebuild with my 320GB drives it took something like four hours.  You get
no command line.

Dawned on me that it would be  possible to run F18 with a F17 kernel so I
decided to do try the upgrade.

The old upgrade path  was to use a tool called preupgrade,  it has been
replaced with a tool called fedup.  It loaded something like 2000 rpms then
asked me to re-boot.  The kernel it built had the same problem as the later
F17 kernels, can't get a command line prompt.    Again messed the raid
requiring re-build.

Not a big problem I  can still boot F17  kernel,  I opened another bugzilla
on it.

I discovered and was also advised by the helpful bugzilla folks on how to
do the upgrade with yum.  it appeared that the bugzilla folks were not too
excited about fedup not working for the upgrade.  The failure was my fault
of course, or at least that was the impression I got.

I managed to complete the upgrade to F18 ( F19 is out btw) and got a F18
kernel to recognize my raid. After several days I deleted the kernel
created by fedup, and my old F17 kernel.

Then the bugzilla folks got excited and decided it was not good to not be
able to do an upgrade with fedup ( it is not bootable  with firmware raid
as I said above ).  After I had  deleted all the left over junk they want
more doc.  Some one at bugzilla created a raid5 enviroment and and found
his 'fedup' kernel didn't  boot either.


My environment is raid 1 dual boot.  Nearly all is well now.    I need the
firmware for a broadcom wifi card ( kmod-wl-PAE )  but for some reason it
demands an older kernel than was installed via my upgrade.  I can't  seem
to figure out how to fix it.... so more fun.

I Have a tiny WIFI dongle that I don't use all the time so I plug it in a
spare USB port...  ( I didn't mention this is on a laptop  where WIFI is
almost mandatory for me ).   It  didn't seem to want to work.  up/down
up/down.... I moved it to the other side of laptop and I got a better
signal but still up/down... repeat.

Hmmm dawns on me I have a wireless mouse with USB dongle.  I used a 'USB'
extension cord and yaaa it works when placed at distance from my wireless
mouse radio dongle.

So now I'm starting another firmware raid 1 build on a different box.  Do I
like a challenge or what.  Install for F19 didn't seem to like raid 1 array
until I used partition magic to re-write the partition table.  When you use
firmware to create the raid array it doesn't make a partition table.

Should you consider trying this... The normal routine is to put wondoz on
first then add linux.  This has problems because windows creates some kind
of 'hidden' partition that Linux can't find.  The fix is to use, partition
magic ( i have a usb bootable version ) to create a partition at the start
of the drive that you can give to windoz, then do the windoz install to
that partition.  Then when time to do the Linux install ... the partition
with windoz shows up OK and Linux can do her thing.

The F19 install allows one to bypass the lvm mess and to create a partition
setting with a separate  /home.    Finally  I got so tired of messing with
LVM.

I'm having great fun except the weather is so nice out, I should do this
when the snow if flying.

73
---
Vince
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