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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Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
