Mismatched diskinfo on Software RAID
Posted: 26. May 2013, 05:47
Hi there, I'm using Physical disk access on a multi disk configuration on a Windows 7 x64 Host.
When accessing one of the disks through Physical Acces from VirtualBox I get a mixed result on the diskinformation, it happens to be a part of the RAID in stead of a physical drive.
The same situation appears when booting from a Ubuntu 13.04 configuration, so it seems not a Host based problem, more a VB one.
The simplified hardware configuration:
- Physical disk 0: 2 partitions, one Linux, one NTFS
- Physical disk 1+2: software RAID-1, 1 volume with 2 NTFS partitions
- Physical disk 3: 2 NTFS partitions
- Physical disk 4: USB port with Linux partition on stick
The VB .vmdk points to a physical drive (RW 1953525168 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive2" 0) which is actually the physical disk 3: 2 NTFS partitions.
On booting up with a System Rescue CD (or any other Windows/Linux variant) no errors are shown, the "sfdisk -l" shows the expected 2 NTFS partitions (checked by physical parameters).
Mounting however is not possible, giving errors like "special device /dev/sda2 does not exist", the "blkid" showing a label with type=linux_raid_member.
Booting up a VB .vmdk at a USB disk (RW 1953525168 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive3" 0) always works as expected to the USB information, including mounting and read/write physical access.
My understanding is that some parts of the diskinfo are the mapped results due to the software RAID and others to the pure physical ones, which conflicts on mounting devices.
Why is VB showing different diskinformation within the same environment ?
When accessing one of the disks through Physical Acces from VirtualBox I get a mixed result on the diskinformation, it happens to be a part of the RAID in stead of a physical drive.
The same situation appears when booting from a Ubuntu 13.04 configuration, so it seems not a Host based problem, more a VB one.
The simplified hardware configuration:
- Physical disk 0: 2 partitions, one Linux, one NTFS
- Physical disk 1+2: software RAID-1, 1 volume with 2 NTFS partitions
- Physical disk 3: 2 NTFS partitions
- Physical disk 4: USB port with Linux partition on stick
The VB .vmdk points to a physical drive (RW 1953525168 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive2" 0) which is actually the physical disk 3: 2 NTFS partitions.
On booting up with a System Rescue CD (or any other Windows/Linux variant) no errors are shown, the "sfdisk -l" shows the expected 2 NTFS partitions (checked by physical parameters).
Mounting however is not possible, giving errors like "special device /dev/sda2 does not exist", the "blkid" showing a label with type=linux_raid_member.
Booting up a VB .vmdk at a USB disk (RW 1953525168 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive3" 0) always works as expected to the USB information, including mounting and read/write physical access.
My understanding is that some parts of the diskinfo are the mapped results due to the software RAID and others to the pure physical ones, which conflicts on mounting devices.
Why is VB showing different diskinformation within the same environment ?