On Monday 17 March 2003 12:31 am, Andrew Miller wrote: > Having big trouble trying to configure MDK 9.0 with a Promise IDE RAID. > If there are drives attached to the the RAID controller, in this case > a couple of Western Digital 80 giggers, the BIOS allows me to set up > the RAID. However, the Mandrake 9.0 installer only sees two separate > drives. It also seem to insist that these are hda and hdc, making the > other drives in the box hde and hdf. I want to use the drives the > installer sets to hde as the boot disk and location for the root > directory, but since I can't seem to get the installer to see the array > as a single volume, I tried to have the bootloader put on hde, with the > plan to configure the RAID array later. But then the machine won't > boot. Default location for the bootloader is on hda and it looks like > the machine fails to find it on hde. > You can fix the drive lettering problem by setting ide=reverse as a kernel boot parameter.
> Is there a different strain of Mandrake Linux that will properly see > the RAID array at installation? Is there something I'm just missing > here? Been beating my head on this for a day and it seems like it > shouldn't be so difficult. The Promise controller is on the > mtherboard, processor is an AMD XP2200+ with a gig of PC2700 RAM. Any > help with this is appreciated. The machine has been running fine with > just the two original drives (100 gig IBM 75GXP's) in it, but it just > won't go with the array. > Well, it is really not a Mandrake problem but a Linux problem. ATA RAID is not supported well in Linux, mostly because the hardware vendors do not create linux drivers and do not make sufficient info available to the kernel guys to allow them to create drivers. So, you are pretty much SOL. ATA RAID is software RAID, meaning that a driver is required to make it work. Hardware RAID solutions like SCSI RAID do not need a driver, the hardware takes care of presenting the device to the OS as a standard SCSI device. 9.1 may be better, but I wouldn't count on it. Try setting them up as single drives and using Linux software RAID. -- Greg
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