Slack on an ATA100/RAID controller
 

I am trying to get Bigslack to start up on my FAT32 partition. However, I'm not sure what I should put in the linux.bat file for the device name.


My hard drive is on an ATA100/RAID controller. The motherboard is an ABit VP6 (dual P3) with onboard HighPoint HPT370 ATA100/RAID controllers. The drive is not set up as aprt of a raid array. Its just on there to take advantage of the ATA100. Moving the drive to the regular controller is NOT an an option.

I dont want to do anything to provoke and problems with WinXP. I've tried a bunch of different device locations with no luck. The following are some of the configurations I have tried

\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda rw vga=791
\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 rw vga=791
\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hde1 rw vga=791
\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hde rw vga=791
\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/sda rw vga=791
\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb rw vga=791
\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 rw vga=791
\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 rw vga=791

All of those produced the same "unable to mount filesystem" error.

Any ideas or suggestions are appreciated.

Well, if the hard disk partition is on the first hard disk then I would think the hda1 or hde1 should of worked, depending on how your native IDE controllers are being seen.

Since they weren't, I would suggest watching the kernel ring buffer post its messages and see if the RAID controller is even being seen. You can use the [shift][PgUp] keys to scroll screen back up to review the messages. The kernel you are using (vmlinuz) is probably just the bare.i kernel for regular IDE controllers and may not provide support for the controller. Therefore the kernel may not even report the hard disk as present.

Also, you might post how you are booting the system. I do not think WinXP can boot to a DOS mode or shutdown to DOS mode. I would think you need to use a floppy disk or bootable CD to boot DOS first. Then run the linux.bat file.

Perhaps it has been of some help.

I dont think it was seeing the raid controller at all. All that information flew right by me. I'll try try the shift-pgup tomorrow & see what it says.

As far as booting it, I am currently rebooting the computer with a Win98/dos boot disk & launching the loadlin from there.

Thanks for the shift-pgup tip though. I was wondering if there was a way to slow that down (or pause it). That should help me get some more info.

Okay I was able to verify that no, it does NOT even see the raid controller.

However, I made a boot disk from the "raid.s" boot disk image from Slackware. When I boot with that, it detects the controller & assigns it "/dev/hde" but it has trouble mounting it because its a FAT32 file system.

So now I guess I need to figure out a way to get support for my HPT370 into the zipslack/bigslack configuration.

Any ideas? Anyone?

I tried to locate if there are special kernel paramters required for this but the loadlin16c.txt doesn't state that any are required. Neither does the kernel parameters file. I checked the config file for the raid.s kernel and it supports umsdos, fat, vfat, etc.

However, you stated that you created a boot disk. And the compiled RAID kernel you used doesn't want to mount a FAT32 root system. So it is possible that loadlin takes care of any mounting requirements for the kernel. I would suggest you copy the raid.s/bzImage file to the local C: drive in the \linux directory with loadlin. Use the file name vmlinuz2 for example. Then modify the batch file to load vmlinuz2 kernel and the root partition as /dev/hde1.

Perhaps that will be able to kick start it.