On Tuesday 21 October 2003 09:29 am, Greg Meyer wrote: > On Tuesday 21 October 2003 08:57 am, John Richard Smith wrote: > > Bryan Phinney wrote: > > >After spending an hour this weekend trying to get my Highpoint 372 RAID > > >controller working under Mandrake 9.1, I finally figured it out and got > > > it working. If anyone else was having problems with this, send me an > > > email and I can tell you how to get it going. > > > > Always a good idea to post the solution anyway as other will find it > > using a search engine and solve their problems thereby. > > Yes, post it to the list, or better yet, add it to the twiki. When you say > you got it going, do you mean as a RAID cntroller or as a standard IDE > controller.
As both, either or. First of all, my own experience was that I received a kernel panic every time I tried to load Mandrake Linux with the RAID controller enabled in the BIOS, either as standard IDE or RAID. I did not have any drives connected to the controller and connecting anything was useless since I would get the kernel panic when trying to boot with it enabled in any capacity. I needed to add ide=reverse to the lilo options in order to resolve the kernel panic. Still not sure exactly why this is, I understood that the ide=reverse line was necessary if you wanted to boot from the ide 2 or 3 controllers but not if you simply wanted to use them as additional channels. At any rate, adding ide=reverse allowed me to boot with the controller enabled in the BIOS. I also thought that reversing ide on the option line would reverse drive lettering, ide 2 and 3 become ide 0 and 1 but on my system, that is not the case. Linux drive lettering still shows hda/b for ide 0, hdc/d for ide 1, hde/f for ide 2, etc. Moving a drive from ide0 to ide2 necessitates remapping all the partitions. Adding this option may seem very simple and I am thinking that I should have figured it out before, but I did not feel very pressed to do so, and based on my understanding of wanting to boot different devices, I honestly never thought that I needed to do that to simply use the additional channels for additional hard drives. Also, I was sort of hesitant to try to manually mount partitions from the rescue cd and remap them, afraid I was going to screw it up and have to rebuild the system entirely again. When I should be cautious, I usually am not and when I am, I usually shouldn't have been. Once that was done, I moved two harddrives over to the new controller and loaded the Mandrake CD in rescue mode, manually mounted the root drive on what used to be hda and then edited fstab to change hda and hdb partitions to hde and hdf where they are now located. I also edited my lilo.conf file to actually point to the new drive lettering on the new channel. I do not think that I had to boot from the RAID controller though, the SOYO allows you to specify the primary boot device, either RAID or HDD-0,1,2,3 in the BIOS, so you could still boot from the primary IDE controllers if you wanted to. I did switch mine to boot from RAID as primary device in the BIOS. I restarted and voila, the system came right back up. So, now I had the RAID controller functioning as a normal IDE device. I then downloaded the HPT 372 1.31 opensource drivers in tarball format from Highpoint Technologies web site and compiled them for my kernel using kernel sources. You get a loadable module. I run insmod on the modular driver and now I have two new additional devices, SDA and SDB, scsi emulated disk drives on the RAID controller. I threw on a couple of real old hard drives and built a striped volume just to test it, but I have removed it and won't stripe the other ones because I don't need RAID right now, and I have data on the drives already. Only thing left is to add the loadable module to kernel modules under ide/raid and insert a line to automatically load it at startup. The only limitation that I can currently see is that you must have a root volume on a non-RAID drive or else you need to recompile the kernel to build HPT372 into the kernel itself for booting. Since I would probably only want to use RAID for critical data like home directories and /var, /usr and the like, I don't see much of a point in messing around with trying to boot from a striped volume. To boot with RAID, simply build the HPT372 driver as a static driver and rebuild the kernel to incorporate support for it into the kernel. Now create a lilo entry for the new kernel and boot from it, the driver should be loaded at boot and create the devices so that you can run RAID at start. The /boot sector still has to be on an ide device since the kernel has to load from a non-RAID device but that can a very small partition on a hard drive located on the ide channel. If you have enough money to buy multiple hard drives for striping, you probably have a few extras lying around for that use. Gee, maybe my wife has a point when she complains that I have too much computer stuff around the house....nahhhhh. ;-] One other thing that I noticed although I haven't figured it out yet, on the primary ide controllers, I was getting an avg speed of about 40-45 MBS buffered transfer rate. On the new ones, I get about 60MBS buffered transfer rate. Same drives, don't know why it would be different except perhaps that I am splitting traffic on to more channels now. -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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