Long story short, I have an 8 drive SATA RAID 5 array. I built it with 8X160gb drives from the same manufacturing batch (WARNING - one of the worst ideas ever, mix and match your drives - more later). 1 drive failed and the array started rebuilding since it has 1 hot spare and 1 global spare. Of course the array got to 97% (after 26 hours) and a second drive failed. I managed to get the array somewhat rebuilt, and Windoze is recognizing it, but once I navigate into the 'drive' I can see the folders (e:\) but I can't access any of them using Windoze.

What I would like to do is to mount the array under knoppix, and start transferring files off (client files and photos are most important). However this is a challenge since I can't mount the RAID array on Knoppix. Raidcore offers Linux driver files for the following distro's:

  • • RH 9
    • RH enterprise 3 and 4
    • Fedora Core 1, 2, 3, and 4
    • SuSE Pro 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 10
    • SuSE Enterprise server 9


Two questions:

  • 1. Does anyone know which driver will work best with Knoppix 5.0.1?
    2. How do I apply the driver once identified
    3. How would I then mount the drive after installing the driver


The system also has a system drive (c:\) which Knoppix does see. I dropped all of the below linux drivers on the c:\ branch and I am hoping that I can run them from there.

As promised, some recommendations for 8 drive RAID arrays:

  • 1. I would recommend buying 10 drives initally, 5 from one manufacturer and 5 from another, same capacity
    2. Initially build the array with 4 from each batch
    3. Every 3 months of uptime, remove 1 drive from the array, and swap in a one of the unused ones (rebuild the array on 7 drives, then expand the array to accept the new drive when you add it)
    4. What this accomplishes is that you decrease the liklihood of 2 drives failing at close to the same time
    5. And ALWAYS remember to do complete backups on a weekly basis to a secondary system (one touch drive is good to)


Thanks in advance for the help.

Daniel