Where is my software RAID?!

There are a few different ways to view RAID information on Fedora. Here are two commands that can help.

1. Print Mdadm config

You can copy and past the following command to print the mdadm configuration.

cat /etc/mdadm.conf

It should return something similar to the following.

$ cat /etc/mdadm.conf
# mdadm.conf written out by anacondaMAILADDR root
AUTO +imsm +1.x -all
ARRAY /dev/md/Boot level=raid0 num-devices=6 UUID=21ce258a:015d0dd4:90d5b80e:ab04b7f7
ARRAY /dev/md/Root level=raid0 num-devices=6 UUID=4be32ad0:f3aa77bd:139d749d:4a6aab60 

We see from the above output that we have two raid arrays. Both RAID 0 over 6 drives.

2. Print mdstats

You can show the mdstats by running

cat /proc/mdstat

Should get output similar to the following.

$ cat /proc/mdstat
 Personalities : [raid0]
 md126 : active raid0 sdc2[0] sdf2[5] sde2[4] sdd2[1] sda2[2] sdb2[3]
       5856552960 blocks super 1.2 512k chunks
 md127 : active raid0 sdc1[0] sdf1[5] sde1[4] sdd1[1] sdb1[3] sda1[2]
       3133440 blocks super 1.2 512k chunks
 unused devices: 

This shows us the RAID size. About 5TB on one and 3GB on the other. The 3GB is used for the boot partition.

Other Notes

Apparently there is a difference between “mdadm” and “dm-raid”
Mdadm is for managing and creating software raids, while dm-raid interacts if a device like a laptop has a “fake RAID”

https://superuser.com/questions/721795/how-fake-raid-communicates-with-operating-systemlinux/721796#721796
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23164384/what-is-the-difference-between-dm-and-md-in-linux-kernel

For more information on managing RAID with Mdadm, you can refer here.

Clonezilla – Clone Windows 10 from single SSD to New Raid 0 SSD Volume

Boot up and create your raid array

Boot into Clonezilla and get to command line :cry: unfortunately you can’t clone from disk to raid in clonezilla interface, however we can do it from the command Line!

Basic steps are as follows. Replace raidarray with the name of your raid array.

  • Initialize raid array with dmraid -ay or kpartx -a /dev/mapper/raidarray
  • use gdisk to backup structure of source drive
  • Write gdisk backup to raid array
  • use ntfsclone to clone to raid array
  • ntfsclon –overwrite /dev/mapper/raidarray /dev/sdSOURCEDRIVE

RAID Volume not accessible in Linux

Typically your RAID volumes will show up as /dev/mdXXX

If it is not, it could be because the device mapper module is not loaded.  Load it by running the following command.

modprobe dm-mod

As a side note you can list the block devices using

dmraid -b

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=42321

If your still having trouble you can try installing mdadm and dmraid

apt-get install -y dmraid mdadm