Installing Mandrake 9.2 with Promise 376 RAID
 

I am trying to install Mandrake 9.2 on to my PC. I have a Promise Fastrack 376 RAID array in striping mode. The two seagate 120G disks are already partitioned and setup with Windows 2000.

I installed a Western Digital 6G HDD to hopefully avoid having to install Mandrake 9.2 on the RAID array.

What's happened so far is that I have been able to install Linux on the 6G HDD which is connected to the IDE secondary port as an single drive. However, the bootloader was not installed on to the windows RAID because it was not recognised when linux installed. I have looked at the promise site and there appears to be drivers for Linux, but they need to be compiled for use. Also I noted from the Mandrake site that RAID is supported.

So how do I install Linux so that it will recognise my windows intallation on the RAID array.

I am newbie to the linux world.

Thanks
Alan

I don't know if Mandrake 9.2 will work with the precompiled driver from the website. Try downloading the mandrake 9.0 driver. It expands to a directory. The readme.txt file contains instructions on how to install the driver in a New System during the install process.

If that doesn't work, try copying the Fastrak.o driver to an ext2 formatted disk. (You may need to boot up to the install disk, press F1 and enter the option "rescue" to get in the rescue mode to be able to create an ext2 formatted floppy.

Then reboot the computer, press F1 and use the option "expert".
Actually for your purposes, enter the option "expert ide0=0x1f0,0x3f6,14 ide1=0x170,0x376,15 ide2=0 ide3=0 ide4=0 ide5=0 ide6=0 ide7=0 ide8=0 ide9=0"
The ide=... stuff is explained in the readme.txt file.

The installer will ask if you want to load in a module. put the floppy disk in the drive, answer yes and select the "Fastrak.o" module. Hopefully, the hard drive will show up as sda during the disk partitioning phase.

There is a post install script on the disk that will prepare the initrd file adding the Fastrak.o module. Hopefully this will work. If not you may need to expand this file and mount it on a loop back device. Then change a line in the linuxrc script the loads in the Fastrak.o module by adding the '-f' option to the insmod command.

After all of this I can't say the linux will be able to boot. I think that lilo supports striped/mirrored raid-0 drives but not raid-1 drives.

I hope this helps. The promise controllers are poorly supported in linux. Only a couple distros and only one kernel version for each. You might consider purchasing another ide drive for linux.

I did install another drive to install linux. My problem is that I can't boot from it. I can only boot from Windows which is on my RAID array. The only way I think I will be able to boot from linux is to swap the boot drive in the bios. This is not exactly an ideal solution. I was hoping to load a driver that would allow linux to recognise the windows RAID array. Is this possibel? where do I find it? what exactly are the steps has I am completly clueless to the linux world.

Help!

If you haven't already solved your problem...
 

I don't know if this will help, but you can probably use a Windows-configurable bootloader like GAG. Note that you should make sure that whatever you use won't cause you problems (see MozillaQuest article on Symantec's BootMagic here).

Ayway, the point is that I don't think* you have to use the default bootloader from your distro.

-David

*but I could be wrong...

edit:
Note that my suggestion of GAG was only because it was the first thing I came across. I have never used it. You can check out SourceForge for more opensource projects (i.e., bootloaders) that may be of use.