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    Ubuntu Dual Boot with Raid 0 Possible?

    Discussion in 'Linux Compatibility and Software' started by Austin R Anderson, Sep 25, 2019.

  1. Austin R Anderson

    Austin R Anderson Newbie

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    Recently, I have attempted to download Ubuntu on my old Alienware 17. I need a linux OS for running a few data processing applications for school. However, I've been having issues with the installation and I found an old thread suggesting the Ubuntu installation would not recognize any partition on a raided drive. Is there any way around this short of disabling raid in the Bios and doing a fresh install of both operating systems?
     
  2. Vasudev

    Vasudev Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Change SATA controller settings from RAID to AHCI and ignore any warnings. Save and exit the BIOS setup and you're good to go for a Clean install of Linux and Win 10.
     
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  3. etcetera

    etcetera Notebook Evangelist

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    The real question is, why do you need RAID at all?

    with ssds, it's not relevant.
     
  4. Austin R Anderson

    Austin R Anderson Newbie

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    I've yet to upgrade the old hard drives in that computer to ssds. It was a stupidly expensive option when I first purchased the computer. And yeah, I know I'm wayyyyy behind the times on that one. I'll get to it someday. I don't use that computer too much anyway.
     
  5. etcetera

    etcetera Notebook Evangelist

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    I got my MSI Titan GT80 Skylake with that stupid RAID configuration, supposedly it's faster (but you never notice in real life).

    The risk of failure goes up twice.. either one of these SSDs failing leads to the entire cluster failing.

    Buy a 1TB SSD - install it.If you run Windows, use macrium reflect to clone the RAID - which appears as a 512GB disk - to the new 1TB SSD.

    Then make it bootable. There are a few steps to take but it's pretty simple. disable RAID in BIOS, chose AHCI.

    I then installed a single, second SSD for the purposes of being cloned to.

    So, primary 1TB SSD is getting cloned to secondary 1TB SSD that's just on standby.
     
  6. ALLurGroceries

    ALLurGroceries  Vegan Vermin Super Moderator

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    It goes without saying that you should back up any valuable data before attempting to touch the partitions on your array to do anything like resize them and add new partitions.

    You should be able to install onto fakeraid, but you may have to manually partition. The devices will be exposed as an array via dmraid, ending up as /dev/mapper/foo instead of /dev/sdX. Hence you will have to partition using /dev/mapper/foo as your target instead, and I'm not sure how the ubuntu graphical installer handles that.

    If the array isn't exposed by device mapper after booting the installer, run a live OS and paste the output of dmesg here.
     
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