First and foremost, Arjan's drivers do not yet provide the fault tolerance
that is the point of using RAID1.
I encountered similar (LI 01 01 01 01 01 01...) problems when trying to
boot from a RAID0 array on a highpoint controller. After an unbelievable
amount of time, effort, and some black magic, I finally got it to work.
I installed the latest version of lilo and the latest highpoint bios by
getting a hacked motherboard bios from biosmods.com (since it was an
onboard controller). I made a boot CD with a custom compiled kernel that
included the approprate drivers, and booted from it. Finally, in
lilo.conf I had to explicitly specify where I wanted lilo to write by
including:
disk = /dev/ataraid/d0
bios = 0x80
The only reason to use this highpoint/promise software RAID thing is so
that you can boot off a RAID0 disk array. You will also then be able to
use that same array in Windows. If you aren't BOOTING from a SINGLE RAID0
(striping) array, then save yourself some effort and use the linux md
drivers. Plus, ** it is completely impossible to construct a BOOTABLE,
FAULT TOLERANT 0+1 array **. If only Arjan's drivers would recognise more
than one RAID0 array, then it might be possible to run linux md overtop of
ataraid since linux md RAID1 IS fault tolerant and lilo supports booting
off a linux md RAID1 array (and the ataraid drivers make the underlying
RAID0 arrays appear to be single disks).
You might be able to do 0+1 with the closed source drivers, but then you
can't use a self compiled kernel.
Its too bad there aren't more developers on this. If I was more of a code
monkey I would love to help out.
Scott Bartlett
Motherboards: Abit KT7-RAID and KG7-RAID, HPT370 / HPT370A
On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Marc-Christian Petersen wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> i have a Promise FastTrack TX2 IDE-RAID Controller with 4 hdd's using
> mirror/stripe. All works fine if i boot from a floppy using nfs-root from my
> nfs-server, i can mount the raid /dev/ataraid/d0, partitions work fine, but if i
> want to install lilo (it runs w/o any failure) and reboot the server to boot
> from the harddisks, it won't work. Always get: LI 01 01 01 01 and so on. Here
> an output from fdisk:
>
> Disk /dev/ataraid/d0: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 19452 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/ataraid/d0p1 1 17 136521 82 Linux swap
> /dev/ataraid/d0p2 18 19 16065 83 Linux
> /dev/ataraid/d0p3 20 274 2048287+ 83 Linux
> /dev/ataraid/d0p4 275 19452 154047285 5 Extended
> /dev/ataraid/d0p5 275 529 2048256 83 Linux
>
> Yes, there are 152gig available :) i know.
>
> Can any one tell me how to set up lilo correctly that it BOOTs my linux from
> the raid ?!? ... Read so much docu's and nothing works ... Same failure
> again and again ...
>
> System: Debian SID (selfmade Kernel 2.4.17) and yes, the following is set:
>
> [*] Boot off-board chipsets first support
> [*] PROMISE PDC202{46|62|65|67|68}
> [*] Support for IDE Raid controllers
> [*] Support Promise software RAID (Fasttrak(tm))
> [*] Highpoint 370 software RAID
>
> and an append line with "ide=reverse" to get hde -> hda and so on.
>
> Many thanks for your help and your time.
>
> Kind regards,
> Marc-Christian Petersen
>
> --
> GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet.
> http://www.gmx.net
>
>
>
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>
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>
