Dual boot Linux and WS2019 installed in RAID 1
Hello. I have an HP Microserver Gen8 with 4 HDDs: HDDa, HDDb, HDDc, HDDd. I have installed Windows Server 2019 as RAID 1 (using the HP Smart Array) on HDDa and HDDb. When I power on the server, it will boot directly to Windows Server 2019.
I have defined HDDc as RAID 0 and I want to install Linux Debian on it. Using an image of Debian on an USB stick and booting from it worked fine. I created the necessary ext4 and swap partitions on HDDc and the installation proceeded. The issue arises when the installation process asks to install Grub. I would like to dual boot WS2019 and Debian. Grub detects 2 installations of Windows and asks me where to install Grub on the main drive (the one with the boot sector). It shows a list with the following drives HDDa, HDDb and HDDc.... Which drive should I select? Thanks
You will likely need to put grub on both disks on that software raid setup, otherwise the RAID will be out of sync. The other way to do it is not to use Grub, and use Windows boot ini file to select your different boot partitions or disks.
Otherwise, software RAID should be turned off for dual boot situations.
All. Sorry for my delay. Yes I do use the Dynamic B120i controller. Still working on this but closed to a solution. Stay tuned.
If you can see the physical Disks from within your OS, you aren't using a real hardware RAID, but rather your controller is a mere FakeRAID controller doing Software RAID. A real RAID controller would hide the physical HD's from your OS & only present the actual 2 RAID arrays to it.
FakeRAID is notorious for it's unreliability & bad performance. If your microserver has the possibility for that, I'd install a real RAID controller & connect the disks to that, then install the 2 OS's.
If you can't do that, turn the Smart Array RAID off, & rather setup your OS's built in software RAID. Both in Windoze & Linux it performs a lot better & more reliably, & in Windoze you can create the mirror after you have installed the OS. Before installing any OS, remove any partitions on all the HD's. First just install Windoze normally, without RAID, to the first HD. Then Install Debian to the 3rd HD & you will only see that one Windoze installation to install GRUB to. Also during the installation when you get to setting up the disks for the installation of the OS, you should be able to select the 3rd & 4th disk to setup RAID 0 on, & then start the installation. Also, if your server is setup for UEFI boot, I would leave a 300MB or so sized partition unformatted during the Windoze setup on Disk 1 for the Debian EFI partition, then when installing Debian, mirror that partition for FAT32, & mirror it to the 2nd HD. Then mount it to /boot/EFI for the Debian installation.
Once Debian is installed go back to Windoze & setup the Windoze partitions to mirror to the 2nd HD. In older Windoze OS's that was done via Diskmanagement. In Windoze 2019 probably too, but the newer server OS's often use something like Server Manager where that can be hard to find, & since I haven't used M$ server OS's for some time you may have to do some searching around to find that option.