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I bought a Hp Microserver Gen10, but I was unable to install ClearOS 7.3 using Raid1. Before installing I upgraded the firmware to ZA10A320 from ZA10A290. I tried to install several times, first time using the built in Raid controller (Marvel 88SE9230) and I created an Raid1 array. The problem was that the installer have seen the two separeted disk, and the installed system doesnt boot. I deleted the array in the controller, deleted the configs from the disks, and tried to use the disks with software raid. Result is similar, the system doesnt boot.
What is the solution, how can I install ClearOS to the machine using Raid1? What was wrong?
Thanks for the answers!
Friday, January 12 2018, 05:55 PM
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Monday, January 15 2018, 02:21 PM - #Permalink
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I agree with Nick here, hardware RAID in this situation might not be the best solution.

If you still want to use this card, know that it isn't certified for ClearOS so as developers, we have no way to test or debug it. That card is supposed to have support in Linux but I see that it can have funky problems with issues related to IOMMU. And there are some issues with IOMMU on MicroServer as noted here. On the preload, we address some of those issues but you may have to play with the IOMMU. The behavior of this device during the certification process was that even when it is off in the BIOS, some elements are visible to the ClearOS kernel and it tries to load the software stack to support it. This results in a warning in the dmesg output. But it is possible that the load of the IOMMU is causing the bad behaviour in the card. Not a good sign though for the Marvel. IOMMU acts as a soft stack for PCI Interrupts in virtualization to improve performance. If this card cannot have IOMMU in the kernel running then it means that you will likely not get optimal performance if you try to use your MicroServer for virtualization.

HPE has a RAID card that is certified in ClearOS for the HPE MicroServer and it works splendidly.
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  • Accepted Answer

    Monday, January 15 2018, 08:01 AM - #Permalink
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    I had a look at this last week. The direction to go is to use the SoftRaid in Linux rather than the BIOS RAID. There is something in he back of my mind that says you may have to clear the disk boot sectors but I can't remember why so I've been hesitant to post. If you do, use the following command:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1
    Change sdX for your disk device name. You may need to do an "fdisk -l" to determine which disk is which as you don't want to do it to your USB device. This will clear both the boot sector and the partition table effectively giving you a blank disk.
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