Hiya. Dunno if this is useful, but in case it is, please see inline...
On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 15:27, Shane Kerr wrote:
> I saw some suggestions that Linux software RAID would be fine if you
> don't need compatibility with non-Linux systems. Since this is a
> Linux-only box, I tried that. Unfortunately there is no way to disable
> the RAID features of the Promise built-in controller, at least not
> through the boot screens.
Well, sorta. I have an Asus A7V333, w/ FastTrak133. I'm going to
assume it's fairly similar to your FastTrak100.
Under the FastTrak BIOS, what I did was create TWO arrays, one for each
disk. So the first RAID array is, effectively, hde, and the second one
is hdg.
> Additionally, the Promise BIOS demands that
> there be a RAID array defined or it will automatically create one. When
> I tried to access the disks separately through /dev/hde and /dev/hdg
> this at first appeared to work, but then I started getting IDE errors,
> the drivers did strange things like disabling DMA, and so on.
I initially tried a bunch of things to be able to use the "hardware"
RAID that Promise advertises. Various things I read, combined with the
fact that I couldn't get their proprietary drivers to work, caused me to
give up. Instead, I treat the two drives as, well, two drives. I've
attempted to partition my installation so that the obvious "busy"
partitions are not all on one disk.
After installing RH-7.3 (supported "distro" for us within Cisco), I've
been running pretty smooth for a month or more. The bulk of my twin
60-Gb drives are empty (empty partition, unformatted). When I get some
free time (yeah, right 8*), I intend to use the kernel's md driver to
stripe (raid0) the two unused 50-Gb "chunks" on my drives.
The bonus is that if anything goes really wrong, I can swap the drives
to a different (non-Promise) box and still be able to get to my
partitions.
--
klash | | I feel like I'm diagonally parked
.|. .|. in a parallel universe.
.|||. .|||.
.:::::::.:::::::.
