Software RAID card and Mandrake
 

Hi,

I have recently purchased a Silicon Image Sil0680 PCI ATA/133 IDE-RAID card for the purpose of setting up a small fileserver. I have 4 160GB drives attached and I have setup the software on the card for a Striped-Mirrored set.

I have gone thru the intsall of Mandrake from scratch, and after the setup is done, i get L 99 99 99 99. I know this is a lilo issue. I also have recognized that at the begining of setup, Mandrake does not recognize the striped set that the controller has setup, but each drive individually. I imagine this would have something to do with my problem.

I have searched everwhere the last 4 hours trying to find a solution to this with no resolve. Any help would appriciated.

Thanks

Is the RAID card's internal BIOS properly configured? With hardware RAID, the OS (I believe) should only see one device.

it is, but I dont belive it a true hardware raid card. when the system boots, the raid cards bios recognizes the drives and the array that has been created.

james

bump

How did the drives appear to the installer? 4 separate drives, or one big drive?

4 seperate drives. for some reason, it doesn't recognize the array setup from the card

shameless bump

If they are 4 separate drives, and you used software raid on them, that I don't know if that can be bootable. Bootloaders have no knowledge of software RAID. I may be wrong, but you may want to look at the software raid howto on tldp.org.

Mandrake doesnt recognize the array, it just probes the controller for drives. I downloaded Fedora because I read that Red Hat had better support for the controllers. Once again, I was wrong. Anyway, I did get a little closer, at least as far as to almost getting the driver for the controller installed. Notice I said almost.

At the boot prompt ( this is for anyone else who might have this problem and can get farther than I did with the raid) you have to type : linux expert text hde=noprobe hdf=noprobe hdg=noprobe hdi=noprobe hdj=noprobe hdk=noprobe hdl=noprobe " then hit enter.

That got me so far as to boot up forcing it to "not recognize the drive" and load the driver for the controller.

Anyway, still working on it, now I think im going to compile the driver modue with the new kernel, If I can figure out how to do that. this last paragraph I am just regergitating what I have read.

get "mdadm" and at install it asks if you want it to autostart all raid devices at boot.
may want the mdadm monitor option too.
grub will handle raid 1 mirrored boot and a root raid device.