On Thursday 17 May 2001 07:32, John Clark wrote: > I have a MSI 694D motherboard with onboard VIA 686a chipset ide controller > and Promise FastTrak 100 w/ lite bios. > I also have an additional Promise FastTrak 66 with full bios. > > I am trying to use Mandrake 8.0 > > I have 5 hd's and a cdrom all set to master. > 20gig onboard VIA ide channel 1 > cdrom onboard VIA ide channel.2 > 40gig onboard fastrack channel 1 > 40gig onboard fastrack channel 2 > 30gig on pci fastrack channel 1 > 30gig on pci fastrack channel 2 > > If I have all drives hooked up and boot the cd the cd hangs affter it > detects hda and hdc > the pdc driver in the kernel only sees 1 channel on the 2 promise cards. > > If I unplug the cables from the drives on the promise cards I can boot the > cd and install. > > after installing I can plug the cables back in and see 1 40gig and 1 30gig > drive but I get random lockups. (do I need to recompile the kernel???) > > I have tried changing the way the drives are in the promise bios (1 drive > stripe, 2 drive stripe, 2 drive mirror, etc) with no different results. > > My guess is that the kernel module needs some parameter passed to it to see > the second channel on the promise controllers, but I don't know what to do. > > I have searched and searched on the net for answers and put my problem into > mandrake expert but still no answers. > > If someone could help me I would appreciate it much! I don't want to > install windows again just to use my drives. Sorry, Promise FasTrak is NOT SUPPORTED. To be blunt, IDE RAID Controllers, with the exception of 3ware, are more notable for the amount of money they are able to make fleecing consumers than for any hardware RAID. The RAID functions are controlled by secret EPROM software and are far less efficient and totally incompatible with Linux Software RAID. Also, they are proprietary, and they have no drivers for kernel 2.4. (RH driver for kernel 2.2 existed but it was also not free software) We have been able to use them only by turning off the RAID, or, lacking that, by installing on ONE drive and using it in mirroring mode, using the controller to copy to the second drive. Also, our tests showed that drives attached to that controller ran slightly faster and with much higher noise immunity, if driven at udma4 instead of udma5... In other words, the limited tests we were able to do showed that it handled the drives better at Ultra-66 than at Ultra-100. Civileme > > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
