On Sat, Jan 25, 2003 at 03:31:36AM -0500, Murty Rompalli wrote: > > While it may or may not be possible to disable raid feature on Promise > card by pulling a jumper, here is a better solution: > > Disabling Promise RAID (just use it as IDE controller without FastTrak): > > In the FastTrak BIOS, choose SPAN with only the first hard disk. Say NO or > OFF to all silly options such Gigabyte boundary etc. You can do the same > thing with Striping (i.e Stripe but with only one disk with all the > options OFF) but I prefer SPAN. Need this be done for each disk in the array, or just the first one so that the FastTrack BIOS is happy that it has been configured? > This way, you can boot your Promise Array (which happens to be just SPAN > with one disk in the above case), pass Append Line for booting Linux (not > required for RedHat 8.0) and use the disks as simple IDE disks. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Just what I was looking for! > TIPS: > > 1. Delete disk array in FastTrak BIOS (i.e. no raid defined therefore > disks not bootable), boot off of RedHat CD #1 to install Linux. Do all > your disk partitioning. Then reboot. > > 2. ONLY when you are done partitioning the disks and you rebooted and made > sure the partitions are all there, you should create any raid in the > FastTrak BIOS. > > 3. At the time of compiling kernel: > Unselect "Special FastTrak Feature" (because we DONT want to use FastTrak > BIOS) > Select Promise Controller support PDC20xxx (not as module). If you dont > select this your kernel probably will not boot or will boot but DMA is off > Unselect Promise Software raid (because we want a non-fasttrak ide box) > > 4. Run hdparm utility to make sure your both disks have dma enabled and > time cache reads and disk reads > hdparm -d /dev/hde (check if dma enabled) > hdparm -tT /dev/hde (time the reads) > (Please be awake when using hdparm command so you dont pass any wrong > options by mistake!) > > 5. You may have to pass at the time of booting idebus=66 Would this be "idebus=100" or "idebus=133" for the faster controllers or does the kernel only recognize up to 66? Thank you! -Michael -- In light of the terrorist attack on the U.S.: They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
