Raid 0 SATA working on silicon image 3112 controller
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Raid 0 SATA working on silicon image 3112 controller
Hi all,
I'm entering this info because I've spent months looking for it and want to make sure others can find it.
I have a Asus A7N8X mobo with a Silicon image 3112 controller and 2 Seagate SATA 120G drives attached using a raid 0 configuration. I'm using a single raid set giving me a single 240G drive.
I tried various Mandrake and RedHat distros with no luck. They would generally see the controller just fine, but get confused over the drive geometries and refuse to install.
I just tried SUSE 8.2. It recognised the drives and raid and was able to partition the drive. It barfed when it attempted to install the first time, but I think that was because I had just created the partitions and it had not synced the drives. I rebooted and the install then worked without a problem.
I noticed that SUSE used both the sil3112 and ataraid kernal modules when installing and I'm going to have a look this weekend to see if I can work out why it worked when RH and MDK would not. I'll post what I find here.
Now if I could just get openGL working on my 9700Pro <sigh>
I've been working with gentoo and SUSE distros to better understand this. On both of these I found it is required to have the ataraid and sil3112 kernel modules loaded. for example, after booting gentoo, I execute the following commands:
$ modprobe ataraid
$ modprobe sil3112
I think it may be important to load the ataraid module first but I'm not sure about that. I suspect that both MDK and Redhat don't load these during the initial parts of their installs which is why they can't see the raid sets.
Once these commands have been executed, the output from '$ lsmod' should show both modules in the list of loaded kernel modules.
Under /dev you should now have a new directory called /dev/ataraid. The structure under that however seems to vary according to the distro (don't ask me why!) for Gentoo is was /dev/ataraid/disk0/disc for the raid drive (i.e. fdisk this to setup partitions) and /dev/ataraid/disk0/part1, /dev/ataraid/disk0/part2, etc for the partitions. I can't exactly remember the names that SUSE8.2 used, but the partitons where called d0p01, d0p02, etc and the drive was just d0.
So basically if you can boot your redhat installer, get to a command line during the initial stages and add the kernel modules, then you can probably get it to install. Just remember to use the /dev/ataraid/.... partion mounts instead of /dev/hd... which are the physical drives.
With gentoo I could also add 'doataraid' as a parameter to the installer kernel to auto load the ata raid support modules. I don't know if this will work with RH and MDK, but you could give it a try.
I'll give this a go when I get home tonight. I am also going to try and go one back in bios on my A78NX motherboard to C1004. I didn't look too carefully but I think C1005 has bug fixes to the RAID sets for Window XP which I could also be affecting things.
One quick question. At the moment I have not formatted the drives. Once I have the RAID set do I format this RAID set or do I format each individual drive first.
Thanks for your help. I'll let you know if I get anywhere.
Initially I just used the drives in a none raid format to make sure everything was working. All the distros had no problem with seeing them as hde and hdg. Then I pressed alt+f4 (or is it ctrl+f4 - the PCs at home and I'm typing this at work) to get into the raid bios during boot up. I setup up the two drives as a single raid 0 partition and then started loading with that.
You don't format the raid set as such because once you have successfully loaded ataraid and silraid it acts as a normal drive. You can then use fdisk (on /dev/ataraid/disk0/disc (gentoo)) to setup the partitions and their formats. The rest of the load process will format them as if they where normal partitions during the install. Or (in the case of gentoo) you can use the mke2fs, mkswap, mmkreiser, etc commands to manually format them from the command line.
Tried modprobe ataraid. Worked fine no errors
Then tried modprobe sil3112 and I get on getting module does not exist. Tried to find the module with no luck !!!!
Do you know whether I should be getting this from somewhere else other than in the 2.4.20-18.9 module/drivers directory
Gosh no, it's a fairly new driver and only exists in some of the gentoo kernels I have been looking at. It must exist in SUSE8.2, but I don't know about MDK or RH.
I'm sorry but I don't know how to add a driver to a kernel build if it's not there. Perhaps someone else can help you there. Otherwise I would suggest looking for a distro that has it already in place.
All I can say is that you definately need the silraid and ataraid drivers.
After lots of surfing around and getting very frustrated I have decided to go for an Adaptec Card 1210SA which supports Red Hat. I'll let you know how I get on with this card !!!
I could not get RAID to work with a fresh RedHat-9 install on two WD 120 GB SATA drives configured as RAID 0 attached to a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP (which also uses the SiI 3112 SATA RAID chip). The chip was detected, and the disks were seen, but they gave "no response: status = 0x7F" when accessed afterwards (via PIO) by the kernel. As a result, the installation could see no hard drives at all.
I deleted my RAID set (in the BIOS) and mapped the SATA drives to master and slave (primary), and now the install is proceeding smoothly.
I am trying to install Linux on a raid0 on the A7N8X Deluxe. But Suse 8.2 does not work for me. There is the ataraid module, but none called sil3112, only a silraid. However I cannot load this one. An error message appears and vanishes so quickly I can't even read it.
Derek, could this be the one that in your Distro is called sil3112? Did you enter any particular parameters when loading it? But then the distros should be the same. I checked with the Suse retail DVD version and the download version. Hmmm, very confusing...
Simon
Last edited by theflyingbro; 07-27-2003 at 04:19 AM.
SiI3112 support is only available in kernel-2.4.21 or later. The only current distro that includes SiI3112 is mandrake 9.1 (with a patched 2.4.21-pre kernel).
I suppose there is a way to patch the kernel during install or install a newer kernel than actually is in the distro, but I really have no clue how to do this.
I'm afraid I will have to wait for the next distro with post 2.4.21 kernel...
If your experimenting with various distros, then give Gentoo a try. It's a little different in the way it operates from RH and MDK, but becuase of the way you compile and install it, you can obtain all the latest drivers and software easily. I've since switched to it and am really enjoying working with it. It gives a real sense of power to be able to choose software and compile explicitly for your hardware.
I have successfully got a Slackware 9 up and running with an Asus A7N8X Deluxe which includes the Silicon Image (Sil3112) Serial ATA controller.
To do it you will have to use the ataraid.i kernel bootdisk from Slackware-current (/slackware-current/bootdisks/ataraid.i). This kernel is built from 2.4.21 and includes the Silicon Image drivers.
Once you then boot from the floppies you then install from the CD-ROM as normal.
While I was able to get up and running this way the drives are sloooow!
# hdparm -tT /dev/hdg
/dev/hdg:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1880 MB in 2.00 seconds = 940.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 6 MB in 4.28 seconds = 1.40 MB/sec
I believe that section is supposed to say something about "UDMA 100" which is likely why its so slow (not in UDMA mode). I assume there is a configuration issue and if I figure it out I'll post the solution.
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