Comments for Biglis Blog

Comment on How to access Windows Spanned Dynamic Disks with Ubuntu by bigli

bigli — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:51:44 +0000

Why is your standalone drive also part of the fakeraid?
What about trying the devices /dev/dm-6 (the part of the fakeraid that belongs to the spanned disk) and /dev/sda1 (the standalone disk).
The partition type is ok. Mine show sfs as well. But thats probably garbage as fdisk can’t recognise spanned volumes.
Can you also post (or send me per mail: bigli at bigli dot ch) the first block of each volume?
You can do this with dd: dd if=/dev/dm-1 of=/path/to/file count=1 and the same for /dev/sda1.
Maybe it will help me to figure out what the problem is.
Nicolas

Comment on How to access Windows Spanned Dynamic Disks with Ubuntu by Rodney Beede

Rodney Beede — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 14:57:28 +0000

Didn’t seem to do the trick. I got the same error even with all the proper offsets and multiple combinations.

However my computer has started to freeze up so it could be related to a hardware issue.

Comment on How to access Windows Spanned Dynamic Disks with Ubuntu by Rodney Beede

Rodney Beede — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:01:57 +0000

The problem is I have two 750GB drives that I used the BIOS nVidia FakeRaid to put into a stripe for a single 1.5TB. In Windows I partitioned 1TB into a SPAN with another separate physical 1TB drive.

So I have to use dmraid to load the two 750GB drives into their stripe first. I have a software span on top of a fakeraid stripe.

When I look at the raw disk (/dev/sda) of the physical 1TB drive with fdisk I see a SFS partition type. If I look at the combined 750GB stripe I see multiple SFS partitions.

Comment on How to access Windows Spanned Dynamic Disks with Ubuntu by bigli

bigli — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:35:56 +0000

I think that this method won’t work when you use /dev/dm-X devices.
Have you tried using the /dev/sdaX or /dev/sdbX devices?
I’m not really sure what the problem is, but I think, that the /dev/dm-X devices don’t really map to the physical partitions 1:1, as they are provided by the fakeraid tool.
In my setup I actually didn’t use the fakeraid tool/driver.
So you should try to use the “real” devices (like /dev/sdb1).
Let me know if this approach works, as I’m always happy for some feedback.

Regards

Nicolas

Comment on How to access Windows Spanned Dynamic Disks with Ubuntu by Rodney Beede

Rodney Beede — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:54:29 +0000

I am having trouble with mounting on my system. I have an EVGA motherboard with an nVidia chipset and fake raid. I have 3 hard drives: 2 750GB in a stripe and 1 1TB alone.

I have partitioned the 1.5TB stripe into 500GB for Windows 7 and 1TB for a Windows spanned disk with the other 1TB drive to give me a 2TB drive.

I used your method above on the /dev/dm-1 (partition in side dm-0 which is the 1TB drive as presented by the fakeraid) and /dev/dm-6 (partition from the 1.5TB stripe). I called blockdev –getsize /dev/dm-1 and dm-6 and put the info in my ntfsvolume file.

I run dmsetup create myvolume ntfsvolume, which returns no error. I get a new /dev/dm-7 of the appropriate looking size.

When I try to mount the NTFS volume I get the following error:

NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount ‘/dev/dm-7′: Invalid argument
The device ‘/dev/dm-7′ doesn’t seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

I tried swapping the order in the ntfsvolume file and re-creating, but I get the same result. Any ideas?