Rich 'Forge' Mingin wrote:
That's the problem all of us face. It's a 'chicken and egg' problem. What I do, is get out one of my spare 'junk' hard disks that I keep for this purpose... Old, slow, and just barely big enough to hold a basic Linux install. I install onto the junk hard disk, then compile a fresh kernel, with ataraid built in. Then I boot that kernel and partition/format the RAID, then copy the whole install off the old disk and onto the RAID array. It's not easy, and it can be a lot of work, but it seems to be the easiest way to get the job done.
A shameless plug: Gentoo Linux has ataraid built into the boot CD's kernel. It's rather simple to get Gentoo running on an ataraid, and very easy to check and see if ataraid will talk to your particular chip/card/array, before spending a lot of time installing (You can check right from the boot CD, no install needed!). On the other hand, unfortunately, Gentoo is not quite as newbie-friendly as a nice graphical RedHat or SuSE install is.
Last did a gentoo install it took over a day to install. That's hardly faster than installing ataraid under redhat. Besides it's far easier not to use ataraid and use the md driver instead.
-- Once you have their hardware. Never give it back. (The First Rule of Hardware Acquisition) Sam Flory <sflory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
