y'ello,


I've been scouring this forum as well as others for a while looking for a concrete answer to this question, but every related thread I've seen has been inconclusive so I'm hoping someone can help me out. Right now, on my Windows box, I have two sata drives in raid 0 running windows, and two ata133 drives running in raid 1 storing my important data. All drives are running off of a Promise fasttrak TX2plus raid adapter. Now this setup is perfect for me, as it meets my needs and gives me all the space I need. I've been looking for a way to get windows 2000 and Gentoo to dual boot off this setup, and be able to keep the same configuration (windows and linux booting off the sata drives, but being able to access the ata drives from both operating systems). Most of the threads I have read indicate that at this time it's not possible to run gentoo on sata drives in raid, but some people seem to claim success.

What I'd like to know is wheteher or not it would be possible to get gentoo installed on this configuration, and if so, how? Somebody mentioned putting a regular ata drive in their system and placing the boot partition on it..but I don't recall the details, or if it was even a sata raid setup or ide raid.

Any ideas??

I manage a server at work that has two promise cards in it. The drives are parallel ata in RAID 1 (two sets).

Check the Promise site for driver support. I know they have Red Hat 8 and 9 support, we use 9.

Chris Van Brederode
International Logistics Systems, Inc.
Chris Van Brederode

thanks for the reply. As far as I know, there are drivers available for the cazrd I have (for the 2.4 kernel at least). Would installing these drivers allow both operating systems to see the same array? If so, how would I go about implementing this?

As long as both OS's have the correct drivers installed, and the RAID is implemented at harware level, the RAID should show up as a single drive in both OS. That is one big advantage of hardware RAID over software raid, besides performance.

Chris Van Brederode

ah therein lies the problem. this is a software raid card

I don't have the money to spend ona full hardware card

We have the same cards, and I was under the impression they are hardware RAID, seeing as how the raid arrays are setup before the OS boots and the drivers are loaded. The promise web page does not say one way are another, but the white paper for the card also says that they do not support RAID 1 on the Parallel channel (Master and Slave), which is exactly how ours are set up. I will check our documentation at work on Monday, see if I can find anything else out.

Chris Van Brederode

yeah it's misleading..however if you do a google search for "hardware raid card", you'll see that they start in the hundreds..aaround $300 CAD for a low end one. I paid $100 CAD for this card. Also the general concensus around otehr linux forums seems to be that all promise raid controller cards are software raid..well the fasttrak series anyways
:/

but by all means check the documentation..if you can prove me wrong then i'll be happy as well, because it'll mean that this task should be simpler than it is turning out to be!

whoops forgot to mention..another reason i'm lead to believe this is a software raid card is because prior to installing windows, you're required to provide the drivers for the controller card. If it was hardware raid, as far as I know, no operating system would have difficulty reading it at all because the controler would manage everything and make the array appear as a regular disc drive.

The fact that you have to load drivers to use it doesn't necessary mean it is a software card. The prompt where you load the driver in windows asks for "third party raid or SCSI drivers." Looking through the docs today, it mentions that the card is viewed as a SCSI device by both the system BIOS and the OS. (I can confirm this...the two arrays in our server are sda and sdb). And again to the fact that the arrays are setup through the card BIOS before the OS and drivers load (if it was all in the drivers, set up would be there) and that whether or not you boot from the array is also controlled by the boot order in the system bios. I beleive that the card is a hardware raid, but the OS cannot use "generic IDE" drivers to access it.

Plus, a pure software RAID card would not make much marketing sense, since it would be competeing against Software RAID built into modern OS (like Linux).

But this is a just an educated guess.

Chris Van Brederode