Ocz revodrive

[mik6]

I recently bought a OCZ Revodrive x2 100gig. I have been trying to install the latest daily Sabayon KDE on it but no luck. The revodrive is suppose to be bootable. But the Installer does not see it as bootable.
Scenario 1: If I break the raid 0 on the revodrive then the installer sees 4 individuals small drive and allows me to install with no problem. This kind of defeats the purpose of owing a raid 0 Revodrive.
scenario 2: In raid 0 If i put a /boot on an other HD the installer procedes to install I see it writes to the Revodrive (blinking led)and seems to install sucessfully. Upon reboot, Grub run Ok, but i then get a message saying : Could not find / at such an address.
I believe it is just a switch needed at Booting the Live cd.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[batvink]

maybe the card hasn't a bootable partition yet.
open / install gparted,

Code: Select all

equo install sys-block/gparted

or use fdisk, (both as root)
select revodrive,
in gparted, select toggle flags and mark as bootable.
in fdisk, press a, enter the partition number you want to make bootable.
it's a PCI-express SSD card and for sure IS bootable.,
if the card is empty (no partitions yet) you have to make them bootable

[batvink]

btw,
not all motherboards will boot from the PCI-e slot.
for example: the Biostar TP67XE would not recognize the drive at first, but Biostar has released an updated BIOS so that is fixed now.
you can check if your motherboard is supported here:
http://www.ocztechnology.com/displaypage.php?name=revo_ibis_moboguide

there's a lot of cons and pros about that drive documented on the internet, and wether it wil or wil not boot with Linux.
type "linux on a OCZ Revodrive x2" in google search
http://www.overclockers.com/ocz-revodrive-x2-ssd-review/

i hope you can find usefull information.

[mik6]

I've been looking around, and the fact that the raid is a fakeraid is what seems to be causing me trouble on installation.
On the review at Overclockers he used my mainboard and said it installed to the revodrive no problem (different distribution). I found a wiki on the Arch that shows how to set it up but still no luck.
Gparted sees the individual drive but not the raid 0.
Will now try other distributions to see if it's a problem with Sabayon installer

[ssyspro]

To answer your question about a switch being needed at boot on the live cd, you can try dodmraid this is because the revo drive is a software raid device also known as fake raid. Do a search on fake raid for some more information on that if you need it.

Now I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I tried the same thing about 1 year ago and found the sabayon installer even when it can see and write to the raid 0 will not set it up as a boot device after a lot of research the problem seemed to point to grub2 and since almost all linux distros had the same issue with ssd's in a fake raid 0 configuration. Now about the almost all distros, I did find many posts that ubuntu can install and boot from the revo without any problems this found on blogs, the revo forums, and ubuntu forums I am not sure what ubuntu is doing that nobody else is to make it work and I have not tried to install ubuntu myself to verify this. Now this was from about 1 year ago so things may have changed by now and adding dodmraid on live cd start may solve your problems but I would not hold my breath on that.

To solve this problem I ended up using the gentoo method of setting up linux software raid with lvm to boot from my revo. I did this by disabling the onboard fake raid leaving me with separate drives I then setup a small linux software raid 1 device for /boot **raid 1 for boot is a must raid 0 will not work and a linux software raid 0 device for / this should be fairly easy to do from the sabayon installers manual drive partitioning.

I guess this could be a bug and should be reported but I'm lazy and since the revo experience I have setup several more systems using a kinda home made revo in other words I used 2 or 4 ssd drives and configured them using linux software raid and lvm like I did with the revo and this gave me slightly slower write speeds in most cases but usually I would get much faster read speeds then the revo and since I was not as concerned about the write speeds that meant I was getting better performance at a lower cost and having to go through the same advanced manual raid setup anyway. I guess I should say that I did try to setup the ssd's just like a revo using the motherboards built in fake raid and ran into the exact same issues as with the revo pci-e so the problem is not isolated just to the revo device but any ssd fake raid 0 then I relized using the linux software raid would be better for me anyway.

Also because of the concern about frequent writes to the ssd's causing an early death I also use a standard hard drive for the /home, swap space used for hibernation, and /var to extend the life of the ssd's since those locations seem to have the most frequent changes/writes I also setup /tmp as a ramdrive.

If you find a better solution or find this information useful please post a reply before marking this thread solved so others will know too.