Hello, After much google research regarding Linux RAID I have attempted to install Mandrake v8.2 (2.4.18 kernel) on an Asus A7V266-E system (promise PDC20265? onboard) with two identical 60 gig hard drives. It sort-of-worked, however I am trying to help a small business use a Linux file server instead of their typical Win2K solution so "sort-of" will not achieve the goal in this case. The configuration I would like to achieve is as follows; ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---Physical Layout--- Each of the two drives sits alone on it's own IDE channel, (no slave present). Heard this was best. A CD-RW uses one of the remaining IDE channels independently. I do not care if the Promise IDE controller hosts the two hard drives or the onboard VIA chipset does. I do not know if one or the other IDE controller is preferable for the hard drives, though I can not seem to boot the installation cdrom from a CDROM drive attached to the Promise IDE controller. After Linux is installed a CDROM drive on the Promise IDE controller does work. Willing to ignore Promise RAID controller "features?" entirely and just use it to provide two extra plain IDE channels, since from what I have read any ability beyond this is strictly in the eyes of the marketing department. ---Logical Layout--- One software RAID-0 partition from each drive used as md0 for "/user, /bin" application type files, for speed improvement One software RAID-1 partition from each drive used as md1 for "/home" and the business datafiles, for slight improvement in data security (regular backups obviously still needed as always). The root mount point, "/boot" and anything else Linux needs resides on a non-RAID partition (hde2) on one of the drives. There are two non-RAID Swap partitions of equal size, one on each drive. All the partitions filesystems are journaling JFS (with the exception of the first small partition on each drive which are FAT16). What I got after many install attempts -------------------------------------------------------- I could not seem to get the promise IDE controller to boot from the Mandrake install cdrom if the CDROM drive was the only device on the Promise controller and the two hard drives were attached to the onboard VIA chipset IDE controller channels. I could boot from the Mandrake install cdrom if it was attached to the onboard VIA chipset IDE controller as a slave device, but then one of the hard drives had to share the IDE channel with it, not good for performance, though I guess I could have moved it afterwards. I'm not sure why Linux designated the hard drives sitting on the VIA chipset IDE controller; hde and hdg rather than hda, hdc? The BIOS saw the drives as Primary and Secondary masters. Does the absence of hda and hdc have an adverse effect on Linux? If so how would I change this? When I placed the two hard drives on the Promise IDE controller, leaving the CDROM drive alone on the VIA IDE controller I could boot from the install cdrom, define the RAID array during the installation setup (much novice trial and error here) and end up viewing a Linux desktop until I rebooted the first time. All reboots now require the boot floppy disk I created during the install. I can't boot to Linux directly from the hard drives. I am using LILO and believe the root and /boot files are sitting within the first 1024 cylinders on hde2 which is not a part of the md-x RAID devices. I have a reasonable amount of Windows experience but very little with Linux so I have tried to avoid "recompiling the kernel" hoping that since I defined the RAID arrays during installation successfully and because I only want the Promise controller to act like a plain pair of IDE channels no special work with MAKEMENU (?) would be necessary. In "/etc/raidtab" things look reasonable not-withstanding my ignorance of how exactly it should look, persistant-superblock=1 and the md0 and md1 RAID definitions seem ok. Once booted from the floppy Linux runs fine, however even though the installation process setup the RAID do I still need to reconfigure the kernel to allow booting from my drives on the Promise IDE channels? SUMMARY ---------------- I would like to find a straightforward procedure that would result in the Promise IDE channels available as simple IDE channels like the onboard VIA chipset IDE channels. Attach the two hard drives to one IDE channel each, leaving the CDROM drive on it's own seperate IDE channel but still able to allow a bootable cdrom to work from there. Let the wonderful Linux 2.4.18 kernel manage software RAID on a few partitions on the hard drives mostly to add a small extra degree of datafile protection using RAID-1 and speed up a few heavily used application files using RAID-0. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated or let me know if I am not really even asking the right questions yet. Thank-you Sincerely, Mark Early Seattle,WA b-e@xxxxxxxxx lollyb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
