Linux: Slackware + Promise ATA Raid?

foxkm

Senior member
Dec 11, 2002
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I have an Nforce2 motherboard and a Promise Fastrack 100 with 2 80 gb drives set up on a performance raid (0) and I have XP installed

I wanna repartition and install Slackware 9 on the system, but I know that slackware 9 doesn't have BIOS RAID support for the Fastrack
drive. I can't even get past the kernel booting off the CD when I have the 2 80 gig drives plugged into the fasttrack controller, it hard locks on the detection on the drives hooked to the controller.

I unplugged the drives from the RAID controller and put on a 3rd hard drive onto the onboard controller and installed slack 9 on the 3rd drive. I recompiled the kernel to have Promise controller support and the Fasttrack support. If I reboot and have my RAID drives plugged into the Promise card, it will still lock on kernel detection of the promise card. Anyone else have any issues with this?

Also, I am thinking about setting up a partition on my 160 gig (2x80gb) to run this linux and copy the install from the 3rd drive to this partition. My second question is that I wanna know if it is possible to boot the kernel off that partition considering the partition exist on 2 different drives. Would lilo have to deal with this considering its not booting off of a hda/sda device and actually off of a ataraid/d0 device to get to the point to mount this as root... Of course I have to get the thing to read the partition first.

Anyone know anything about thise matter?
 

cleverhandle

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2001
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Odd problem. I've used Slackware and other Linux flavors just the way you describe (install to 3rd drive and copy over) with a Promise Fasttrack Lite and no problems. From your description, it doesn't sound like you're having a general Linux problem, but more of a specific hardware quirk. Maybe Google will save you.

As for LILO, it works fine with a boot array. Just check your booting first - after you copy from drive #3, add an entry to (the #3) lilo.conf, and use that LILO to boot the array. Once you verify that you can boot to the array, install LILO again from there.

edit: Hey, wait a minute. You said you included Promise controller support AND Fasttrak support. You only need the latter (the part under "ATA RAID controllers", the former is for using the Promise cards as regular Ultra IDE controllers.
 

foxkm

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Dec 11, 2002
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edit: Hey, wait a minute. You said you included Promise controller support AND Fasttrak support. You only need the latter (the part under "ATA RAID controllers", the former is for using the Promise cards as regular Ultra IDE controllers.


Thanks for your info. When I select the Promise under IDE controllers, and it gives you 2 sub options. The first one is the DMA support for mulitple promise cards. The second is for the fasttrack Bios support. I have to select promise support otherwise I can't choose the fasttrack support. Maybe I will try a 2.5 kernel and see if it is just a kernel bug. I am using an A7N8X board and the promise card is in the very last PCI slot on the board. Maybe that causes a problem..

-foxkm
 

cleverhandle

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Dec 17, 2001
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You're choosing the wrong options. Below the section you just mentioned, there's "Support for IDE-RAID controllers", which you'll see if you flagged "experimental features" in the code maturity section. That's the support you want. You don't want to select any of the options in the "Promise PDC ... Support" section.
 

foxkm

Senior member
Dec 11, 2002
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O.K. I have recompiled the kernel again, this time I only added suport for Support for IDE-RAID controllers and no Promise ATA support.
During the boot it comes up with the exact same couple of lines detecting a Promise controller and locks right at the end before
it skips to the hda, hdb, hdX listing... I again unplugged the raid IDE cable and let it boot to recompile again.

Second try, I completly removed the Support for IDE-RAID controllers so there was nothing relating to Promise controllers. Make Clean, recompiled and installed that kernel. It still detects the PDC0XXX device and locks even though I didn't compile anything into the kernel... I downloaded 2.5.60 and went through configuring it. I didn't see a section for Support for IDE-RAID controllers. Compiled this, but something happened to lilo on the temp drive. Going to have to totally reinstall on this drive now since it doesn't boot, even with the original 2.4.20 kernel. Any other suggestions would be great

Thanks

Kyle
 

chsh1ca

Golden Member
Feb 17, 2003
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That's very odd. I was using a Promise controller that was onboard in my ASUS A7V133, however that was in non-raid mode. Make sure that you tell the kernel it's ide-scsi too.

At boot, try passing hda=ide-scsi as a kernel parameter, where hda is the drive you're having a problem with.

Also, at install time don't boot from CD, but rather from a floppy image. On the slackware CD, in tools/ and images/ there are utilities for creating the special install boot disks you will need. You'll need probably five floppies. Just create a regular install boot disk, and use one of the SCSI images for RAID (I think raid.s or raid.i). That should work and allow it to install properly from the get-go. Let us know how it goes.

PS: If you boot up with a bootable floppy/CD linux, you should be able to mount your old partition, then chroot to the new partition, and reinitialize lilo if it caused problems. Probably save you a fair bit of time.
 

cleverhandle

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2001
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No, it won't be an ide-scsi device if the controller is in RAID mode - it will show up as ataraidd0 for the array and ataraidd0p? for the partitions (or something close to that - it's been a while). SCSI emulation is not required.

I don't see any obvious problems at this point, though. Maybe a bad interaction with the nForce2 chipset? Have you tried the Promise card in other slots?
 

foxkm

Senior member
Dec 11, 2002
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I haven't had a chance to try the setup in another slot or even on a different board yet. I'm assuming its a problem between the
Promise controller and the nforce2 chipset. The damn thing runs great in XP with Raid 0. It's only when detecting the drives that the kernel hard locks. Unplug the drives from the Promise card (boot off 3rd Hard drive onboard IDE) it will go past just fine.

foxkm
 

foxkm

Senior member
Dec 11, 2002
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Here is the screen that it boots to off the slackware CD using kernel raid.s:

Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initalizing RT netlink socket
Starting kiswapd
VSF: Diskquotas version dquot_6.4.0 initalized
Journalled Block Device driver loaded
pty:512 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c with HUB-6 MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IRT SERIAL_PCI enabled
Real Time Clock Driver v1.10e
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision:6.31
ide: Assuming 33Mhz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=XX
PCI_IDE: unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 device 48, VID=10de, DID=0065
PCI_IDE: chipset revision 162
PCI_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
PDC20267: IDE controller on PCI bus 01 dev 50
PDC20267: chipset revision 2
PDC20267: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20267: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary MASTER Mode Secondary MASTER Mode.
ide2: BM-DMA at 0xd800-0xd807, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio
ide3: BM-DMA at 0xd808-0xd80f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdg:pio

AT this point the system has FROZE, and will do so until I unhook my 2 80 gig raid drives hooked to the first ide chanel on the Promise card.

ANY CLUES???
 

Abzstrak

Platinum Member
Mar 11, 2000
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download the Gentoo install LiveCD... it has support for the promise raid.

I have almost the same setup, an Nforce2, FastTrack100, two 80GB's running RAID0... easy under Gentoo.... only quirck I had was that in the fstab I had to specify the partitions as /dev/ataraid/disc0/partX , but in Grub I had to do it as /dev/ataraid/d0pX ..... took a few minutes to figure out.

anyway, I haven't installed slack in ages, so I cant help much there, but try the Gentoo live CD to eliminate it being a hardware issue. Just boot off of it, then do a "modprobe pdcraid"


Also, when running the fasttrack go ahead and enable those other options for the promise IDE and for enabling DMA at boot... I dont know why but it almost double my harddrive performance on my stripe set.
 

foxkm

Senior member
Dec 11, 2002
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I have a NTFS partition already on my striped set. Could the partition on the set be causing the kernel to freeze while detecting the hard drives attatched to the Fasttrack card. Also. Is it possible to boot off of the striped set to linux?

foxkm