Paul Ingram wrote:
Hi,
I have a number of Intel SE7500WV2 boards which have an onboard promise fastrak tx2000 controller. Using the intel-supplied promise driver and 2 x western digital 180Gb drives one on each channel as 'JBOD' (not raided)
The system sees the drives as sda and sdb and under load I get the apparently common error:
FastTrak : Drive interrupt timeout.(1), status = d0 FastTrak : RESET Channel1 * DEV1(OK), status = 0x50
Sometimes we get (FAIL) and the system hangs.
This has been going on since mid-feb and I still haven't got anywhere. All the systems (15 of them) give the same problem to varying degrees. I have tried everything I can think of.Here are a few: (surprisingly, Intel haven't been very helpful)
Tried other manufac. disks, IBM, Maxtor. (not many manufacturers make drives =>180Gb which is the size we need)
(seagate 80Gb barracudas work ok)
Tried upgrading intel bios.
Tried installing later rev promise driver from the promise web-site using the append line idex=0 etc.
Tried power supply and replaced ide cables with higher quality ones.
However, I have found that RedHat 9.0 works fine. This is because it uses a pdc202xx_new driver written by Frank Tiernan at promise. I tried mailing him but no reply as yet. I need to run RH7.3 for compatability reasons so I would like to use this driver in 7.3 instead of 9.
I have tried compiling this driver under 7.3 but I am not a kernel/module expert and so far my efforts have not proved successful.
Has anyone ported this module to 7.3 or can anyone offer a bit of guidance so I can compile it myself?
You might want to try 2.4.21-rc2 from kernel.org . (Or 2.4.21 when it comes out.) I've been using it on the SE750xwv2, and other intel and tyan boards with promise. I can't speak for the ataraid driver as I either use the md driver, or normal ide disk mode. the basic driver ide driver is very stable.
PS- Have you tried the 7.3 errata kernel? It's basicly the same as the 8.0 driver. I know a few people using ataraid under 8.0, and 7.3 with the errata kernel. (On tyan boards, however.) The update is really easy. Just install the kernel, and change your fstab, and lilo/grub to use the correct ataraid devices.
-- There is no such thing as obsolete hardware. Merely hardware that other people don't want. (The Second Rule of Hardware Acquisition) Sam Flory <sflory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
