With regards to your message, where you stated:
Hey all, I have a motherboard (ECS K7VTA3 V3.1) with onboard RAID from promise using the chip PDC20265R. I bought two Maxtor DiamondMax 80Gb identical drives. I am booting off of a already functional gentoo linux system using a 46Gb disk on ide0. hda is the 46Gb, hdb is a 1.6Gb, hdc is a cdrom, hdd is a cdrw, hde is 80Gb#1, hdg is 80Gb#2.
When booting with the drives hooked up and the disks in a RAID0 container the kernel only gets this far and then hangs forever:
What do you mean by "RAID0 container"?
On the Promise you need to use ATARAID to build a RAID set.
Do not do anything in the motherboard /Promise BIOS to set the drives.
Do not do anything with /dev/hde and /dev/hdg, except in the context of using ataraid to build the RAID set.
You also need to use a boot append line to tell the regular ATA kernel driver to ignore these drives.
You need an append line to properly address the devices.
To quote:
http://www.murty.net/ataraid/existing.html#DETERMINE
7.2. Determining the Append Line
To determine the correct Append Line, we should first know how all our ide devices are connected. IDE devices can be hard disks, ATAPI CDROM(s) etc. Once we determine the Append Line, we can append it to the boot: options (at the time of booting) or we can alternatively assign it as a string value to the append paramater in /etc/lilo.conf. Unless you love to remember complicated boot: options and type them at boot time every time, you should choose the second method, i.e., insert it into /etc/lilo.conf . You can do so by inserting append="Your Append Line Here", saving file and then activating new /etc/lilo.conf by running the command /sbin/lilo.
For the purpose of understanding better, lets say that your ide devices are as follows:
ide0: hda , hdb (hard disks)
ide1: hdc , hdd (hard disks or other ide devices like CDROM)
ide2: hde (first free disk)
ide3: hdg (second free disk)
The two free disks above (hde and hdg) are the ones we would like to setup as RAID 1 to create /dev/ataraid/d0 raid device. Note that we do not have hdf or hdh because that is how we used the IDE/RAID ports on Promise chip. It is not a good idea to connect two hard disks to the same Promise controller IDE port. In the above example, we used Primary Master and Secondary Master connections on the Promise Technology card.
If you do not know how various ide devices are connected in your computer, take a look at /proc/devices and /proc/ide/*. You can also carefully go through boot log file, /var/log/bootlog (or type dmesg | more right after your Linux system boots) to find your ide devices. Now type less /proc/pci and locate appropriate information about Promise Technology. In the output of less /proc/pci, you can see somewhere information about your Promise chip, something like:
Bus 0, device 17, function 0:
Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology Unknown device (rev 2).
Vendor id=105a. Device id=d30.
Medium devsel. IRQ 10. Master Capable. Latency=32.
I/O at 0x9400 [0x9401].
I/O at 0x9000 [0x9001].
I/O at 0x8800 [0x8801].
I/O at 0x8400 [0x8401].
I/O at 0x8000 [0x8001].
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xd5800000 [0xd5800000].
From this output, we learn that our Promise Technology card uses IRQ 10 for both ide ports (ide2 and ide3). Using same IRQ is perfectly alright as long as your kernel supports PCI IRQ Sharing. By default, our Linux kernel is configured to support PCI IRQ sharing. From the above output, we also learn that our Promise Technology card uses various IO addresses. For the purpose of identifying Promise Technology disks properly at boot time, we only want the IRQ number(s) and the first four IO Address numbers outside [ ]. Write down on a piece of paper this information. In this case, from the above output:
IRQ1 = 10 IRQ2 = 10 IO1 = 0x9400 IO2 = 0x9000 IO3 = 0x8800 IO4 = 0x8400
Now, we have to evaluate the following to obtain the correct Append Line. Then either specify this Append Line at boot time or specify it in lilo configuration file.
ideX=IO1,IO2+0x0002,IRQ1 ideY=IO3,IO4+0x0002,IRQ2
where ideX and ideY are the two IDE ports of Promise card our free disks are using.
In our example, the above Append Line will become:
ide2=0x9400,0x9002,10 ide3=0x8800,0x8402,10
If, for example, we want to boot kernel version 2.4.19, labelled linux according to /etc/lilo.conf, then we specify our Append Line in one of the following two methods:
At boot time boot: linux ide2=0x9400,0x9002,10 ide3=0x8800,0x8402,10
If you choose this method, you should manually type the Append Line after the kernel label linux everytime you boot your Linux machine.
In /etc/lilo.conf image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19 label=linux read-only root=/dev/ataraid/d0p12 append="ide2=0x9400,0x9002,10 ide3=0x8800,0x8402,10"
If you choose this method, you have to run lilo once to activate changes by typing /sbin/lilo. And you do not have to type anything extra at boot time.
With our best regards,
Maurice W. Hilarius Telephone: 01-780-456-9771 Hard Data Ltd. FAX: 01-780-456-9772 11060 - 166 Avenue mailto:maurice@xxxxxxxxxxxx Edmonton, AB, Canada http://www.harddata.com/ T5X 1Y3
