markht

I have a Promise Ultra100 TX2 installed in a Mandrake 9.2 system. It worked out of the box and required no special drivers.

If you want to start/stop a server/daemon process that is already installed, you can use Mandrake Control Center. On the System panel there is DrakeXServies which will allow you to start and stop installed services and daemons. These will start when the computer is booted up, even if no one logs on. If you want to create your own new daemon or service, then services are started and stopped by scripts in the /etc/init.d directory. You wil have to add your new script in this directory. This script needs to be called with the start or stop and most support restart, reload and status too. You need to use the 'daemon' function defined in the functions script in this directory to actually start the process. Look at the other scripts in this directory. Test it till the following work correctly as root. (<name> is the name of your script.) /etc/init.d/<name> start /etc/init.d/<name> stop Note that the actual daemon process will have to fork itself so the start script terminates. Most applications intended to be run as a daemon do this automatically by calling the daemon() function, but I suppose you could do it from the script. To get your daemon automatically started at boot up, do the following as root: chkconfig --add <name> chkconfig --level 345 <name> on chkconfig --list <name> This will auto-start your service/daemon at run levels 3, 4 and 5. I have not actually tried this on Mandrake 9.2, but it works on Redhat, and the man pages say it will work on Mandrake.

I ran 'e2fsck -f ' on both partitions on the new hard drive, and they are clean, so everything looks good. I used 'hdparm -Tt' to test the performance of all my disks. Here are the results: /dev/hda5 – Western Digital 20GB, 7200 rpm, 2Meg cache, Mother Board controller Timing buffer-cache reads: 372 MB in 2.00 seconds = 186.00 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.04 seconds = 25.66 MB/sec /dev/hde5 – Maxtor 80GB, 7200 rpm, 8M cache, Promise Ultra 133 TX2 PCI controller Timing buffer-cache reads: 492 MB in 2.00 seconds = 246.00 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 172 MB in 3.00 seconds = 57.33 MB/sec This is in a Dell OptiPlex GX1 system with a 600 MHz Pentium III and a 33 MHz PCI bus. I am quit surprised that I can get disk I/O performance this high with this kind of a system. Thanks to everyone for their advice.

I only had a couple of hours last night to work on this, which was not enough time to swap this hard drive to another computer where I could install WinXX on it in hopes of fixing any corrupt disk formatting, so I decided to try formatting the disk with PartitionMagic 8.0 (PM). I created approximately the same two ext3 partitions in PM running under Win98. I then booted back to Linux. DiskDrake saw the two partitions with no problem, and I was able to mount the partitions with no errors. I copied some data onto each partition to test it and rebooted Linux a few times to make sure that the disk was not corrupt. Everything seemed to be fine. I plan to do some more testing. I want to do a failsafe reboot and run e2fsk on it to make sure Mandrake thinks the file system is good. The only thing I could see that was different in the way PM formatted the disk, is that it made the first partition a logical partition, even though I asked for a primary partition, so the disk is now formatted with two logical ext3 partitions. DiskDrake had made the first partition primary and the second logical. I think this should make no difference to Linux.

Thanks for replying. I will try something like this. I am not sure I can install Win98 on this disk using this PC, because Win98 needs a driver for this disk controller and the BIOS will not handle a disk this large, but I have a newer PC that can handle this disk without a controller, so I could swap the disk to that computer. I also don't have a retail Win98 install CD. I only have the Dell system restore disk, which wipes the C drive clean and installs Win98 and a few Dell applications. I will let you know what happens.

I am having trouble formatting a new hard drive. I have two 20GB drives, hda and hdb. Win98 is in the first partition on hda and the Mandrake 9.2 is in second partition with swap and /home on hdb. I also have a Promise Ultra133 TX2 PCI disk controller card that is connected to a new 80GB Maxtor disk drive. This controller and disk was installed before Mandrake, and it appeared to have been recognized and seems to be working fine. In the installation process I created a 20GB /home2 partition on this 80GB disk and I have put some data on this partition without any difficulty. These are all ext3 partitions. I am now trying to create another ext3 partition on the rest of the disk using DiskDrake. I have moved all the data off of the /home2 partition, so there is nothing on the disk anymore, and I have deleted all the partitions and recreated them several times with many reboots. Sometimes creating the second partition in DiskDrake fails. DiskDrake gives no error message, but it does not give you the mount option. If I look in the syslog I see: Other times the formatting and mount appear to work correctly, but when I reboot the file system check says hde5 is corrupt and wants to run fsck. When fsck runs, I get an error like: “Couldn’t find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks. e2fsck: bad magic number in superblock while trying to open /dev/hde5…” It suggest running e2fsck with a –b xxxx option to specify an alternate superblock, but that gives the same error. If you run fdisk, it shows the 2 partitions on hde. I also have PartitionMagic 8.0 (PM) on the Win98 and if you run it, it only says there is one “bad” partition occupying the whole disk. It shows the ext3 partitions on the 2 other disks fine. The only other error message I can find in the syslog files is: DiskDrake seems to give this error at various times. All of these are directories on hda5. They are not mount points and they are not on hde. Does anyone have any idea what the problem may be? Bad hard disk? Problem with the Promise disk controller? Software problem formatting large disks? Any suggestions on how to track down the issue? I have been thinking of trying to format the disk with PM, either in windows or booted from PM cd, and see what happens. PM 8.0 is suppose to be able to create ext3 partitions, but I’m not sure they will work with Mandrake. I have also been thinking of trying to format the whole disk as fat32, and run the surface test in Win98. Any other suggestions?