ASUS P4B533 w/Onboard Promise RAID - Problems

[Guest robstitt]

I can't get Mandrake (9.1) to boot properly using Boot Magic on an on-board RAID drive (Boot Magic is on the RAID drive, but Mandrake 9.1 is on another, non-RAID IDE drive).

 

History/environment:

 

I've got 2 120GB (IDE) drives hooked to the motherboard's built-in (Promise) RAID as a mirrored set, I've got a 30 GB (IDE) drive hooked to the primary, standard IDE controller on the motherboard. (Note: the motherboard has 2 "standard" IDE connectors PLUS another IDE connector that is hooked to the Promise RAID controller). My CD-RW and DVD drives are hooked to the secondary IDE controller (with a regular CD drive hooked to a SCSI card). Also note that, when booting from CD, I always boot from the IDE CD-RW drive since the Promise controller seems to get really cranky when I try to move the SCSI card ahead of the Promise controller in the BIOS.

 

I've got (insert wisecracks) my WinXP system working wonderfully, booting from and using the RAID drives (via Boot Magic, also on the RAID drives).

 

Since Mandrake 9.1 didn't seem able to view the RAID drives, I had to install it on the non-RAID drive.

 

Problem is, I really want to be able to use Boot Magic to switch between booting Mandrake 9.1 and WinXP (without having to reconfigure the BIOS every time).

 

Unfortunately, when I tell the BIOS to boot from the RAID drives first (which brings up Boot Magic and, subsequently, WinXP), something about the drive configuration is vastly different than when I boot the non-RAID drive from the BIOS. It appears that the RAID drives show up as "disk 1" and the non-RAID drives appear as "disk 2" when booting directly off the RAID drives. When booting directly from the non-RAID drive, it appears to be "boot 1" (and Mandrake 9.1 doesn't see the RAID drives). Also, it looks like the non-RAID drive appears to be "disk 1" when booting from the CD-RW.

 

Given this, I can ONLY boot Mandrake 9.1 successfully when I tell the BIOS to boot directly from the non-RAID drive. I had LILO write the MBR on the non-RAID drive AND I also tried having it put itself into the primary partition on the drive (to no avail).

 

Whenever I tell the BIOS to boot from the RAID drive to bring up Boot Magic and then select Mandrake 9.1, it fails with a bunch of "99"s splattered across the screen (which, I gather, means the very lowest level of the LILO boot code couldn't figure out where all the drives went).

 

I've tried messing with the various Boot Magic settings, but nothing there seems to work ("Advanced Hiding" IS turned on, since Boot Magic says it is needed when booting to a second drive).

 

This is a catch 22 (until/unless Mandrake supports the onboard RAID) since booting from the Mandrake 9.1 CD doesn't make the RAID partitions visible either--so there is no way for me to install or configure Mandrake 9.1 or LILO with the "troublesome" partitions visible.

 

Any thoughts (preferably some good suggestions too! :) )

 

...Rob Stitt

[pmpatrick]

I think your analysis is dead on. A way around it I'm not sure but one thing you might want to try is using grub instead of lilo. I'm sure there is a way to uninstall lilo and replace it with grub but I'm not sure how to do it. You could just reinstall in expert mode and choose grub instead of lilo for your bootloader.

[Guest robstitt]

Well, I figured out how to get grub to work--but it was a challenge.

 

When I boot from Boot Magic on the RAID drive, I need to use an illogical set up like:

 

title Mandrake 9.1 (from Boot Magic)

root (hd1,0)

kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

 

Note the kernel line...I tell it to boot from the second drive (“hd1”) but tell it to look at “hda1" (which is really the first partition on the FIRST drive). Since the BIOS is booting to the RAID drive first, the hardware treats the RAID drives like "drive 0" and the non-RAID drive like "drive 1". But, since Mandrake can't see the RAID drives at all, it apparently sees the non-RAID drive as "/dev/hda" (instead of the expected "/dev/hdb").

 

When I boot natively from the BIOS directly to the non-RAID drive, it uses something like:

 

title Mandrake 9.1 (Native)

root (hd0,0)

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

 

In this situation, the RAID doesn't show up at all, so the non-RAID drive comes into the BIOS as "drive 0" and Mandrake sees it appropriately as "/dev/hda".

 

Whatever, it seems to work. I'm just glad that grub lets you do seemingly illegal things without telling you it knows better (which was the problem I had with LILO-it was a bit too smart for it's britches).

 

...Rob

[Counterspy]

I read your post carefully and I beleive I have never seen such a complicated setup discussed here. Here are some observations for you to consider.

1) Go to the Promise website here: http://www.promise.com/search_display_eng....}&Keyword=Linux and see what if any support they have for Linux. Note that you need all of this url, not just the highlighted part. This has been an ongoing problem with both Promise and Highpoint on-board controllers and the results are not encouraging.

2) You may do better with the enterprise kernel. Read the kernel docs and if source code makes any sense to you, look at the enterprise kernel source. You will need to download it from a Mandrake mirror, usually the same ones that have the ISO's. The docs are on your Install CD's.

3) Get rid of Bootmagic. This is an uncessary complication with Linux since Grub (and Lilo) will do multi-booting quite well. Get the docs for Grub here: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ .

4) On your Linux system, assuming it is still installed, there are How-To's dealing with Multi-booting, and Software Raid. There may be others of use when you see the titles. If you do not have Mandrake still installed, go to http://tldp.org where you will also find this how-to: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Promise-RAID1-HOWTO/ .

5) Also check the Mandrake Hardware Database here: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fhard.php3 to see if anything here is rlevant.

6) If you damage your XP setup, see M$ KB article #Q307654.

7) Post this question in the newsgroup alt.os.mandrake.linux where some more experienced people can look at what you are trying to do.

 

If you do manage to get this setup working or not under Linux, please post the results here so others can profit from your experience.

 

Counterspy

[Guest robstitt]

As of my previous post, I did get things working to the degree I needed it to. Namely, I am now able to boot to the boot manager on my RAID drive and pass control to grub which then boots Mandrake on my non-RAID drive (or I can tell the boot manager to boot WinXP off the RAID).

 

I haven't gotten Mandrake to read the RAID, but that wasn't a high priority. I simply wanted to be able to boot to it without having to tweak the BIOS everytime I wanted to switch OSes.

 

As for "Boot Magic", I've got that figured out and working. Even though it's an unnecessary complication, it isn't causing any issues right now. Since that is the boot manager on my RAID disk and it works fine, I'm unlikely to try to replace it. When I go to boot Linux, it passes control to grub with no major issues.

 

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out.

 

...Rob