Hiding RAID arrays from linux...

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I have a spare 160gb hd, and I was going to load Ubuntu onto it, when I was going through the installation process, and it found my other RAID arrays that were supposed to be hidden. What's more, the 160gb wasn't even listed among the hard drives. I can't afford to have any other drives altered during the installation, so I've put it off for now. Any ideas on how to fix this, or is this just normal?

I have a BroadCom BC4852 RAID controller with 6x250gb Hitachis (RAID 5), 1x400gb WD (volume), and 1x160gb Hitachi (volume).

Not sure what version of Ubuntu, but it was downloaded recently, within 2 or 3 weeks ago.

 

[nweaver]

why would you need to hide it? if you don't tell it to do anything, it's just goin to mount that array as a RO partition in the /media directory.

 

[n0cmonkey]

If you don't use it, remove it.

 

[imported_LoKe]

I remember my first time installing Ubuntu. I was worried I'd accidentally overwrite one of my full Hard Drivers, so I pulled them out and left the blank one in. Hah.

 

[Nothinman]

How do you think you hid them?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
How do you think you hid them?

It's a feature of the RAID controller. Here is the site
You can check the manual for more information, but "array hiding" is listed amongst the features at the bottom of the page, along with controller spanning, etc.

 

[Nothinman]

My guess would be then that the RAID controller requires cooperation from the driver to do the hiding and the drivers that Ubuntu includes don't know about that feature.

 

[cleverhandle]

I'd guess that all the "hiding" comes down to is that the controller basically shuts down when booted to the OS so that Windows doesn't see a file system on it and thus the array is "hidden" in My Computer. It's probably still visible as a foreign partition in disk management. Linux installers will always show you all your partitions, even they don't know what to do with them.

But this is all paranoia. As others have said, just don't tell Linux to do anything to the array. Unlike Windows, it will do exactly what you tell it to.