?

I'm relatively new to linux - though about 8 years ago I had pleanty fun rebuilding SunOS kernels on a Sparcstation to add an array processor (would be beaten hands down by most pentiums now).

Trying to get Adaptec 1200A ATA raid and mandrake 9.1 to work I checked out sharkys page
http://www.terra.es/personal2/capullator and follwoing the instrutctions there to try and get mdk9.1 installed on my system. Unfortuantely I don't have much sucess

System Spec
Athalon 1.2Mhx
Asus A7V133 (onboard promise 20265 UltraDMA IDE/RAID) - only supports RAID 0 - thus had to get another raid card to do raid =1
Adaptec 1200A IDE RAID card - use highpoint 370 chip
2x Maxtor 80GB drives
1x sony DVD/cdrom x40
nvidia GEforce2 AGP

Mandrake 9.1 installs on the system, but treats the 1200A card as EIDE card so no raid - it installs onto hde (with hdg being the other disk).
I'm not really in the situation have a spare drive to act as boot disk untill I get the raid bit working so I'm stuck with trying to get raid up on the boot device. - makes life harder !

I've recompiled kernel using make menuconfig to exclude the highpoint modules that are supplied and then rebuild initrd as suggested on the above webage having build the "open source" highpoint driver from their website and installed it in /lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdkcustom/kernel/drivers/scsi
I've added a lilo entry to point at the new kernel and change root for that entry to be /dev/ataraid/d0p1

I've modifed /etc/fstab to replace hdeX with /dev/ataraid/d0pX

when I reboot onto the new kernel I get a kernel panic with busybox showing a whole load of unresolved symbols (mostly scsi tags) ? these are in the hpt37x0.o file.

There is not data of any real value of the system (YET) so I'm willing to experiment and publish any sucess for others.

A lot of the raid stuff I've read on the net gives me the impression that I've proable wasted £50 on the adaptec raid card and I would have been better off with software raid and using onbaord Promise Driver as bog standard IDE driver (bios raid disabled).

I am not too fussed with kernel I run (even willing to try 2.5 as long as it WORKS! BUT I am keen to have mandrake 9.1 distro for other packages included (planning for this machine to be www.advx.org based when I get it up).

Ian