Hi,

I'm having massive difficulties installing Mandrake 9.2 or Mandrake 10 Official on a Gigabyte Rackmount Server with an onboard Promise PDC20265R IDE RAID controller using FastTrack100 Lite. The Installation does not recognise the controller as a RAID controller, and effectively tries to handle the drives connected to it as independent IDE drives. Unfortunately, this does not help as these disks cannot be booted. In fact, after reboot, I end up with a black screen filled with 999's and no bootloader.

I've searched the net flat for an answer to this problem, and have found "partial linux drivers" on the promise website [www.promise.com]. However, I am unable to figure out what to do with these partial linux drivers. Is there a simple, step by step way in which I can install the system completely from CD, and ensure that somehow these drivers get installed correctly? I've attempted with both Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0.

If anyone has had similar issues, please post, as I'm trying to either figure out a workaround, or at the very least, try and work out a way to install the system succesffuly.

Regards,
Armond

I'm having similar trouble with a PDC20375 controller. See this post.

Doesn't look like there's much that can be done. I will try to compile drivers for 10.0.

Thanks. Lemme know if you had any joy?

Regards, Armond

sounds like you guys are on the bleeding edge....

erm... why not merge the posts... you could ask an admin to do it....

Im away this weekend but I will have a look into this...
your MEANT to be able to backport the 2.4 drivers in 2.6 in theory but actually doing it might be another story !!

Armond seems to at least have got further....
perhaps this holds the answer for somedude too.
One way if you have broadband or the CD is a live CD like knoppix and see if you cant coerce it into geting the driver working...

the latest knoppix has a 2.4 and a 2.6 .....so ....

I just had to drop AMD64 with the mandrake 2.6 kernel and go back to 2.4 because of driver issues...
strange thing is I now have a working NVIDIA driver for the graphics card .... (using the 2.4 driver) ??? whereas the sound that was working under 2.6 now isnt.

I guess we are in a transition time between 2.4 and 2.6 so things should get better....

I still had no luck after compiling a driver from the [QUOTE]partial[QUOTE] source using my Mandrake 10.0 sources on my notebook.

Any ideas what to do to create either a driver disk or somehow make a loadable, bootable module that will force Mandrake to see the disks as an array?

This is getting me down beyond belief. Any ideas anyone?

Hey Guys,

I was unable to do anything this weekend, but I'll try again today. I will hook up my drives to the built in controller and load 10.0 with the 2.4 kernel.
I will then try to compile the driver from source and do an expert install and load the driver then.

I will keep you posted. Just knowing that somebody is reading this thread makes me feel a little more confident.

Thank you.

Good stuff. Lemme know your progress. Thanks,

P.S. I tried with the Partial Linux source, and got some compile errors. They don't look like they can be fixed.


Regards,
Armond

Well Im reading, i just wish we could do something contructive

Latest news (still bad, though):

I installed 10.0 with the 2.4.25-2mdk kernel and compiled the driver. I thought it didn't compile at all, it was a matter of seconds.
So I got my pdc-ultra.o module, put it on a ext2 floppy and tried to install Mandrake (for the n'th time).

Here is what I had to do to load the module:
- hit F2 at the installer startup menu (F1 works too)
- forced 2.4 kernel with 'alt1' (I have no idea how to force expert with the alt1 kernel - any ideas?)
- went through the few steps to select a CDROM installation and got to the language selection screen
- did an Alt-F2 to get to the prompt
- insmod floppy
- mkdir /mnt/floppy
- mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
- insmod /mnt/floppy/pdc-ultra.o
Module loaded (forced) with warnings, due to the kernel difference (compiled for 2.4.25-2mdk but the installer is using 2.4.25-2mdkBOOT). I figured this shouldn't be a problem.

Well, this is as far as it went. I got some warnings like:
<4> pdc-ultra: [warning] submit cam busy
and errors:
<4> SCSI disk error: host 2 channel 0 id 4 .... return code 27070000

My drives were detected, size and all, but they weren't, how shall I put this - useable.
/proc/scsi is empty

The installation process ends with an error:
/proc/partitions doesn't agree with drakx 5 != 0
Drakx was willing to nuke my partitions, as it thought the partition table is corrupt. (I told it to bugger off).
However, fdisk, after taking a few seconds to examine the disks, did give me the right partitions for both sda and sdb.

I am at a loss. The driver seems to have compiled properly and for the first time I get messages about my drives being recognized by Mdk 10 installer. Well, maybe recognized is not right, identified.

I would really appreciate some suggestions.
Thank you.

Hey somedude,

I managed to *finally* get into contact with someone from Promise (via gigabyte - long story), however, they do not support Linux is the official answer.

I seem to have gotten about as far as you, except my drives are still not correctly identified by the installer. Also moans about corrupt partition and then gets into loop.

*sigh* I have tried everything that I could think of. I've even loaded Mdk 10.0 official to my notebook and tried compiling the *partial* linux source against both kernels 2.4.25 and 2.6.3 (Mdk, with minimal install, basically only source trees).

It's driving me pretty nuts, anyway, I shall search. this may be the end of me haha.

Good luck n thanks

Regards,
Armond

Did you read me explanation of WinRAID ??
Is this a 'WinRAID' card ??? Are you sure its 100% HW, if not then if promise dont support it and if the 'driver' doesnt allow windows and linux RAID to share the same metadata then it looks tough....

Most of all Id suggest sticking in another disk for the install and unplugging the others... when its working and you can actually compile against the drivers and source + you dont need to risk the installer nuking them you can play more but honestly Id not play about with em in until its installed.

"Don't support Linux"... Why do they provide drivers, then? Just to screw us up?

This is actually what I was going to do next. Load Mandrake on hda and leave the other stuff on the PATA drives connected to the TX2. This way I may be able to load the driver so that Linux can use them too.

I will then wait for the 2.6 kernel to support the Promise junk. Jeff Garzik, one of the kernel developers, is looking at it.



Oh, well...

Thanks guys for your support.

Latest news:

Just for the heck of it, after installing Mandrake on my drive while it was plugged into the built in controller, I connected the drive to the Promise controller and tried to boot.
To my surprise, the boot process starts and several kernel messages flash on the screen. It does, however stop with a kernel panic message, init not found. I use Lilo.

Would it be possible to fix it? I think it does boot because the BIOS sees the drive. It stops, however, since no filesystems are available.

Oh, by the way, the diver I compiled from source for 2.4 is either messed up or I did something wrong -> it takes about 60 seconds to mount my partitions or to view their contents. I did that by insmod'ing the driver after loading Mandrake from another IDE drive connected to the built in IDE.

Hi all,

I've givn up trying with mandrake. Will try with other distros this week. Will let u know if I have any success.

Regards,
Armond

Thanks.

I don't think it's the distro, though. Ithink it's the freakin' hardware and the fact that support is lacking. Or, better yet, it's my inability to get it to work correctly. In my defense, there's not enough documentation.

Hi all,

managed to get everything working with Redhat 9.0

Download the Redhat 9 drivers for Fasttrack100 TX2, extract to a linux ext2 floppy, enter kernel paramaters as per the README, install the driver from the floppy, run install, set kernel parameters for lilo/grub, and voila, a working installation.

Had mixed success with slackware, but managed to compile a working driver.

Otherwise, I think Promise should get their ass into gear and start supporting linux properly.

P.S, one good thing that came from all this: I am now running Mandrake on my notebook, nuked my XP installation. Now I only use linux *everywhere*

so can you can use the RH kernel sources and compile your own kernel for mandrake ?????

Good stuff.

Now, if I could get mine to work...

I actually compiled the module from source (the GPL'd version 1.00.0.10). I can insmod the driver, but it takes for ever to do anything with the drives.

I keep getting timeout errors, something to do with 'cam'. Could this be because I only have PATA drives and the SATA ports are being scanned?