Guest packetlos Posted October 13, 2002 Report Share Posted October 13, 2002 Hi guys, I am trying to install Mandrake 9.0 on 2 disks in Raid 0 config using a promise fasttrak 100, promise provide redhat drivers to be loaded in at install time as SCSI drivers but I guess the driver disk is in Redhat install specific format (fat formatted) as Mandrake would like to have a ext2 formatted disk, if the drivers are just for the 2.4 series of kernel rather than for anything on redhat specifically do you think there is any chance of getting them onto an ext2 disk an there being some method of loading these drivers at install time or do you think I am wasting my time?? tia Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted October 13, 2002 Report Share Posted October 13, 2002 I have not seen anywhere where the Promise card works even just for extending the number of IDE ports with Mandrake. Since you want Raid 0, I would suggest you use software Raid and disable the card. The other solution is to use Redhat instead of Mandrake. Counterspy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted October 14, 2002 Report Share Posted October 14, 2002 I have a Promise ATA 100 card which worked poorly in MD 8.2 but works great in MD 9.0. I am not using raid however. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted October 14, 2002 Report Share Posted October 14, 2002 How much of a problem was created if any? I would like to expand my IDE ports, but I have read such dismal reports in the newsgroup, I held back. Counterspy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted October 14, 2002 Report Share Posted October 14, 2002 I've had no problems at all in MD 9.0. I did the install, the card was detected and it works fine. I have my two hard drives on the Promise IDE 1 configured master and slave. On the on board IDE controller I have a DVD drive and an IDE Tape drive on IDE 1 and a CD burner on IDE 2. I have nothing on the Promise IDE 2. I mention that because I recall exchanging emails with someone that tried putting a CD burner on Promise IDE 2 and he couldn't get his hard drive detected on Promise IDE 1 during a Linux install but when he removed the CD burner from Promise IDE 2 everything worked fine. Maybe I'm just lucky. With MD 8.2, the install went OK and I was able to boot into MD8.2. However, in mcc>Hardware my Promise card was listed under Unknown Devices. After running for a couple hours, system performance would seriously degrade often times taking several minutes to launch an application. I could find no running process using ps auxww to account for this. My theory was that the Promise card, being a DMA device with direct access to system memory, was somehow screwing things up. I never pursued this because everything works fine in MD 9.0. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest HarveyBirdman Posted October 14, 2002 Report Share Posted October 14, 2002 According to a post on the gentoo forums, the pdcraid (promise raid controller) source in 2.4.19 is broken. The (unofficial?) fix is simple. In kernel sources -> pdcraid.c, change the "ifndef" on line 405 to "ifdef" and change the "ifdef" on line 672 to "ifndef". I built a custom kernel and found this to work (ie. a bootable kernel which gives a working /dev/ataraid/d0), but what I couldn't do was make a working bootdisk out of it. So, hopefully 2.4.20 will be fixed, and I'll be able to use Mandrake 9.1, or Redhat 8.1, or gentoo 1.4 final, etc. Right now the only recent distro that installs to promise raid (out-of-the-box) seems to be Slackware 8.1. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted October 15, 2002 Report Share Posted October 15, 2002 Thanks for the information guys. Now I will wait yet a little longer. I was hoping to get ready for DVD+-ROM when the winner is declared and the price comes down. Counterspy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyv Posted October 16, 2002 Report Share Posted October 16, 2002 I've had no problems at all in MD 9.0. I did the install, the card was detected and it works fine. I have my two hard drives on the Promise IDE 1 configured master and slave. On the on board IDE controller I have a DVD drive and an IDE Tape drive on IDE 1 and a CD burner on IDE 2. I have nothing on the Promise IDE 2. I mention that because I recall exchanging emails with someone that tried putting a CD burner on Promise IDE 2 and he couldn't get his hard drive detected on Promise IDE 1 during a Linux install but when he removed the CD burner from Promise IDE 2 everything worked fine. Maybe I'm just lucky. With MD 8.2, the install went OK and I was able to boot into MD8.2. However, in mcc>Hardware my Promise card was listed under Unknown Devices. After running for a couple hours, system performance would seriously degrade often times taking several minutes to launch an application. I could find no running process using ps auxww to account for this. My theory was that the Promise card, being a DMA device with direct access to system memory, was somehow screwing things up. I never pursued this because everything works fine in MD 9.0. Thats great i have one of those cards but didn't use it cause i couldn't get it to work in 8.2 I only want it for the 2 extra ide controllers as i don't like putting more than 1 device on a ide controller. I will have a look tonight! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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