I thought it was about time I post an updated account of the trials and tribulations I have faced configuring Black Velvet. I originally wanted my computer to dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu. I knew I would primarily use the Ubuntu partition, but I needed Windows to play the Sims 3 (and to run other applications, of course!…) I also wanted my computer to have a RAID5 array, since I bought three identical 500GB hard drives and my motherboard supports RAID5. After installing Windows XP on Black Velvet, I attempted to install Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope. Unfortunately, the partitioner did not recognize my RAID array. After a lot of struggling, desire to have a working computer took over and I settled on temporarily using Windows XP as a single boot.
A summer of playing the Sims 3 and half a semester later… I decided it was time to tame this beast. I gave installing Ubuntu onto a RAID5 another go. Note: Details here may be a little fuzzy, as I hopelessly switched between Karmic/Jaunty, Live/Alternate Install CDs. I found a handy article on setting up FakeRAID, which was helpful, but ultimately didn’t do the trick because it seems that my (fake) RAID controller and Ubuntu don’t play nicely for RAID5. Eventually I settled on having a RAID mirror for my Ubuntu partition and no redundancy for Windows 7. This made things a lot smoother. I was able to use my actual RAID controller, which only has 2 SATA ports, as opposed to the multiple built-in SATA ports that are “capable of RAID 5”. Using my motherboard’s hardware(ish) RAID controller came with some perks, such as naming my RAID array. I chose to name it TOAD.
Setting up the Windows 7 dual-boot was actually pretty simple, once I found the right information for how to do it. I had to edit menu.lst to include the following information:
-
title Windows 7
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
When it seemed that things were finally going to work out, I ran into another gotcha. This one was mostly my mistake, though. When I upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic Koala, it asked me what I wanted to do with menu.lst, as the upgrade had modified it. I mistakenly chose not to overwrite. When I went to reboot, my new kernel was not listed in GRUB and inaccessible. Note that this was all in hindsight- at the time I had no idea why GRUB was not updated. I may have ended up re-installing Jaunty, but this time overwriting menu.lst when upgrading to Karmic.
The last major struggle with achieving my setup was…. a degraded array! Shortly after I got the dual-boot working, my RAID array was reported to be degraded. I began to question whether it was a hardware issue. I was almost convinced one of my hard drives was bad when I realized that my RAID array worked fine and dandy running Windows XP in the summer. I also drew the conclusion that I had used Jaunty for a week or so (before upgrading to Karmic), and the array didn’t degrade. I determined it must be some type of issue between Karmic Koala and my RAID array, and have since been using Jaunty Jackelope without any issues. I am hoping that the next long-term support version of Ubuntu will not cause my array to degrade, but only time will tell.
It’s nice to see my computer finally functioning the way I want it to. It seems like I have experienced more than my fair share of problems, but I guess it’s experience and builds my troubleshooting skills. Sadly, as much as I went through to get Windows on Black Velvet, I rarely use it. I don’t even have the Sims 3 installed currently… but I blame school on that one. Hopefully this summer I can get back to using Black Velvet as my primary machine.