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PCI IDE card


PenguinPete
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I have a Sunix PCI card for IDE drives to increase the number of drives in the system.

 

Under Windows I had two drives configured as RAID (I thought it was hardware RAID but having searched for a Linux driver it might have been part software) and a third separate drive.

 

It's based on a Silicon Image 0680 chipset and from searches either the siimage or pata_sil680 module seems to drive this under Linux (possibly not RAID - but I can sort that out using software RAID if I can get the card to work).

 

lsmod doesn't list either of these as running and I can't find them on the system or in any places I found suggested. Can anyone shed any light?

 

I need to get this going as I don't have enough drive connections so I'll be grateful for any advice.

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Ah, sounds like fun. I suspect the card you have there is a 'Fakeraid" card, where you provide a driver to the OS so the OS can see the raid array, and the system CPU is used to do the work.

 

I went through this type of issue with my raid array, which is set through the motherboard Intel Matrix ICH10R chip. I needed to use dmraid to run the ICH10R chip. Quickly googling your Silicon Image 0680 and dmraid it appears that dmraid is the 'driver' you can use. Luckily my install picked my array up and activated it automatically. Documentation is a little scarce on dmraid, but have a look around the net.

 

Perhaps some of the other regulars will be able to shine more light on the topic.

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  • 2 months later...

It's been a while since I was working on getting this computer going... and I've been suffering Windows crashing (although today even Mandriva kicked me out to the login screen - so maybe I have a hardware fault - need to keep an eye on that and then if necessary debug the log messages).

 

Anyway, I didn't have RAID (sorry for the confusion - I could swear the two disks had been set up as RAID but the computer knows better).

 

But I've found that entering "modprobe pata_sil680" at the command line brings up new devices (why is this module not loaded by default - it's listed under the information in the Hardware section of the control centre. Then more hard disks appear when re-loading the control centre.

 

What is the correct way to get Mandriva to automatically load the module on boot? If I understand correctly from the web, I add it to /etc/modules.

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Unfortunately the nomenclature of the Linux initscripts is far from being unified. For example, in ArchLinux which I'm using for some six years, it used to be Daniewicz-like ( /etc/modprobe.conf ), which is still what all BSD distros use, but recently it has changed to /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf

Customization at the will of user is surely one of the greatest (if not the greatest) advantage of Linux over windblows, but it would harm no-one if there was a COMMON policy for config files storage.

So- no need for "aagghh" dear daniewicz. It's not just distro-specific, but also release-specific.

Edited by scarecrow
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In /etc/modprobe.d it can be any filename providing it ends in .conf. It doesn't have to be modprobe.conf in modprobe.d. You don't even need to have just one file, you can have many files, because all files in modprobe.d are parsed.

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