Hi List, Seems like many people are trying the same as me, so here a summary: Config: MSI K7T266R with onboard Promise FastTrak lite ATA-RAID 2x 40GB IBM UDMA100 as RAID 0 Athlon 1 GHz etc... SUSE 7.2 (OKok, I'm no RedHat, but I have used your kindly supplied drivers) Problem: How to install the system in a RAID partition and boot from it. Originally the SUSE Kernel 2.4.4 would only recognize the disks as single disks and not as an array and messing with the partition table on /dev/hde in a mixed RAID/single disk mode is not a good idea... On the first RAID-partition I have Win98 to complicate things (otherwise I could simply ignore the RAID capabilities and go with two disks - but why buy the controller then?). The modules worked fine with that 2.4.4 kernel, but no booting from /dev/ataraid/* (at least without initrd) possible, because the array is not recognized as such at boot-time. What I have done: - Installed a minimal system on an idle third disk; the ugly part of it - you need a temporary space to put your system. The problem is obviously how to put a bootable system together, from where you can continue the installation with an installation routine that doesn't support your hardware - mounting part of the array as single disk and part of it as raid creates some VERY strange behaviour (I have tried to move a small partition for installation to the very end of /dev/hde and then install to RAID partitions at the beginning of the disks - no way). Hence the third disk - Got Kernel 2.4.9 and patched it with ac14 - Compiled RAID support for Promise in (will probably also work for Highpoint) - booted the new kernel - now the system recognizes the array at boot time and can mount it directly - partitioned and formatted the array for my new system - copied the system as was onto the new partitions - copied the kernel on a floppy and booted from Win98 using loadlin - FROM THE ARRAY NOW (root device = /dev/ataraid/d0p*) - removed the third disk from the system. - installed the rest of the system with very nice disk performance :-)) - VOILA The whole thing is a little shaky (always make sure to keep a working kernel when you play around with new compilations) and I am still using loadlin to boot, since LILO doesn't like the /dev/ataraid. Next step will be patching LILO, but loadlin with a bootmenu under Win98 is working fine for the moment. A more elegant way would be to take the SUSE (or RedHat for that matter) installation boot-disk, unpack the ramdisk image, build a new one with the new kernel, put everything back together, boot and install from that disk. What I don't know is, how the part of the installation system that resides on the CD will react to that boot-disk. Any volunteers to try that? ;-)) Hope, this helps some people out there. Thanks for the drivers and the tips I got from reading this list. Oh one question: does anyone know, why I can mount /dev/ataraid/d0p1 as vfat (works perfectly), but not /dev/ataraid/d0p10 (gives some errors about garbled superblocks)? Both are Windows partitions Cheers, Stephan
