What if? You just strip everything out and install DVD on hdd and a hard disk on hda.

Hello,

Apologies for the delay in replying but I've been busy playing around with my boxes.

But I must say that I'd also thought about moving stuff around in the box (again !) but after getting Red Hat 9.0 installed I've decided to play with that for a while on this machine and use Slackware on my old machine. That way I get to learn two flavours of Linux at once.

And courtesy of a bit of web surfing I've also managed to mount the second 123 Gb disk (/dev/hdg) as /home/backups so I've now got a backup scheme going too.

So whilst not getting Slackware on this box is a bit of a dissapointment I can safely say that I've learnt an awful lot about Linux (especially the FHS & partitioning etc.) so at least the time wasn't wasted. I think I'll definitely try again when Slackware 9.1 is available.

But thanks again to everyone for your helpful posts - especially Excalibur for compiling the highpoint drivers for me. It's just a shame that this didn't get Slackware on the box (my apologies..)

Linux-tastic !

Hi,

I've got an Abit BE7-RAID based P4 box with 2 80GB Maxtor hard disks (hde and hdg in a RAID1 array). It was bought 4 months ago. I tried to install Linux on it then, but failed on the same errors as Raptor Ramjet. I dismissed the problem till this week.

Yesterday I read this forum on linuxquestions and was sad about not being able to install Slackware to a HPT372 based system. Even so I didn't lose my hope. And now, I've got the system working fine .

I think, it's recommended to do the following things (I just write down the usable steps):
1. Download the Slackware 9.0 iso file.
2. Recompile the ataraid.i kernel image using 2.4.21 kernel source (leastwise I used that).
- I didn't change anything in the config file shipped with the CD only put my network device in it and switched to P4);
- recompiling can be done using the kernels/compile_kern.sh script from the CD. In the script You have to change the kernel version in the 12st line to 2.4.21. When running the script you have to be careful, because it explodes a kernel source from the CD to /usr/src, so if you don't want do loose your original /usr/src/linux directory, you should watch out (e. g. uncompress manually the kernel source to the $TMP dir which is likely to be /tmp).
[2.5 I don't have floppy drive, so I couldn't make boot floppies;]
3. Rebuild the CD image.
- you have to change the contents of the kernels/ataraid.i directory to the output of the previous step which is likely to be in /tmp/output/;
- the isolinux/README.TXT from the CD tells how to do make and burn the image.
4. Install Slackware to your PC using ataraid.i at boot time.

The difference between the original and the recompiled kernel: the new one recognizes the RAID array set in the BIOS. This is shown in the kernel messages while booting.

Now I installed the system and can boot Linux from the RAID array.

I hope these lines will help solving your problem (if you still want to)... If any questions appear, just ask them.

Good luck,
Bence

Hello

Well thanks for the advice. And despite being still very new to Linux I think I'll give it a go (tyhe worst that can happen is that I make a complete mess of things and have to start again)

Unfortunately I'll not have time to try this for a couple of weeks but I'll update the forum with my findings as soon as I have.

Hopefully I'll also be able to do so from a newly installed Slackware !

Hi again,

Good news: you don't have to hack Slackware install CDs any more, because the kernel shipped with Slackware 9.1 recognizes this type of ATA RAID controller (I tried it last week).

Best regards,
Bence

I just installed opensuse 10, and I see that my raid array (stip) is not detected as expected, hde and hdg are detected.

I remember some time before I installed suse9 and then the 2 raid disks where detected as sda1 (scsi disk).

The thing is that I get those wellknown errors that the partition table can not be read and therefore I cannot mount it from the linux box that runs on hda1.

Is there a need for changing the default drivers for the hpt372 ? or something to fix it.

Thanks a lot for your help.

kernel version is 2.6