Installing on existing Sata raid-0 HD

[monsm]

Hi,
I have fedora 7 on my machine using LVM2. This is using the Silicon Magic RAID chip I have on my machine.

I have boot, root and home on separate partitions at the moment and want to reuse these unchanged. I was planning to reformat boot and root and then wait a bit with cleaning up my home partition, so I can get my new gentoo system up first, then move some old data to my new user under Gentoo from the old Fedora one.

I have downloaded a LiveDVD, but the graphical installer don't recognise my LVM volumes. I have tried booting with "gentoo dolvm2", but no luck.
I have noticed there are some howtos around to do a sort of manual install ("HOWTO Install Gentoo on an LVM2 root partition" seems to fit).

Is that the only/easist way to do it? A few mouse clicks on a graphical installer would have been preferable although I have in the past gone through a manual "fakeraid" install with Ubuntu.

[likewhoa]

if you're currently using fakeraid with that silicon raid controller, boot the livecd with dodmraid.
and if you are using the onboard raid controller, maybe i suggest you don't and just use mdadm linux raid instead. yes, i have my reasons but i won't go there...

[monsm]

This is indeed the Sil 3112A onboard chip. Might sound risky running this one in raid-0.

I am very good at taking backups though

I managed to get the LiveCD to recognise my LVMs yesterday by running vgscan from command line. I found that I actually had the LiveCD, not the LiveDVD, so I'll try with that next to see if I can get this system going with Gentoo.

The LiveCD installers (text mode or graphical) still didn't recognise my LVM volumes though. So does that mean a manual install using command line is only option?
The howto I found ealier doesn't cover this very well, so I have to look for another one....

Edit: Saw a different thread on this form and answer seems to be Yes, 1 command line Gentoo installation comming up...

[likewhoa]

i prefer doing installs through the command line as the Gentoo Linux Installer is at best experimental software.

[monsm]

OK, some progress.

I have installed the basic system and it boots. I have boot and home on seperate partitions using plain dmraid (/dev/mapper/sil_xxxxxxxx type thing to mount).
The root partition is using LVM2 and has one of those VolGroup things.

The problem is that although I can boot, after boot is finished the boot and the home partitions are not there and I can only see the root partition itself. Very strange since obvisously the kernel and initrd is on the boot partition and is found during boot itself.

When I try to run "dmraid -ay" I get messages saying devices are already active and it lists all the correct partitions. But if I try to mount the boot or home partitions I get a message from mount that the device do not exist. If I do ls /dev/mapper all is listed there.

Anyone got any idea whats going on? I have gone through several howtos without finding a solution. I had no problem mounting them from the LiveDVD....

[cyrillic]

[monsm]

I am having to write this response using Windows XP, so yes, I do have dual boot here still. The home partition I have is actually an old XP partition I decided to reallocate to more useful purposes

So back to the problem.

dmraid is staying. So do anyone know what sort of configuration is needed for dmraid? I don't remember anything from my previous installations.
I am reasonably sure I included everything in the kernel. I used genkernel and it produced the initrd file as well.

I am starting to think, that maybe thats where the problem is (the initrd file).

Any other views?

[monsm]

Slightly embarrasing this.

On my previous Fedora installation, my striped raid set had this name:
/dev/mapper/sil_afafejbgajdgp

I copied the old fstab thinking that Gentoo would pick up the same name. But not quiet is it happens:
/dev/mapper/sil_afafejbgajdg

Took a while before I found out what the difference was....

A bit strange, but anyway. Progressing with xorg, gnome and compiz-fusion now.