Hey guys! I’m hoping someone can help me out here. I have a FastTrak TX2000 with two drives in RAID 0. I am trying to install Mandrake 9.1 using the Promise provided drivers on their site and have had no luck whatsoever. I have followed their instructions precisely and the installer doesn’t detect the card, nor does it show up in the list of available adapters. I have a friend who is a Linux guru and he has had further luck. He also recompiled the source for the driver on his Mandrake 9.1 system. It compiled without any errors or warnings, but we’re still getting the same results when we try to install Mandrake 9.1 on my system. I am very interested in getting this functioning so if anyone can provide any insight into this, I would greatly appreciate the help. Thanks very much!

I have a computer with a onboard PDC 20267 raid controller. I believe the problems are due to the driver being written for LM 9.0. The source contains precompiled object code. I was able to get it to work only by booting on an extra ide drive, then I can use the raid drive. I get error messages during bootup, but it works (non raid boot). I examined the install script on the install disk I made, and performed the same steps by hand, as if the version tests were successful.
You could try one of two things during setup.
1) Press F1 at the first prompt and enter EXPERT
then have a ext2 formatted floppy ready with the FastTrak.o
driver and insert the disk when prompted.
2) During regular install, press Ctl-Alt-F2, copy the FastTrak.o driver to the ramdisk /lib dir and run:
modprobe FastTrak

The raid drive may be recognised at that point, but I don't think you will be able to use the raid drive to boot. Maybe you will be able to if you made a new initrd file containing the
FastTrak module, but I don't think that will be possible with the version differences.

Maybe someone with more linux experience then I have could explain how even initrd gets read in from the disk during the boot process. In other words, how does the FastTrak get read in from the raid drive. Sounds like a catch-22 situation to me.

I'm sorry I can't help more. The basic problem I think is with the promise drivers not being current, or not having full source so you could use autoconf or ./configure to produce a proper driver.

I have sorted out the problems but the solution is a little complicated:
To install ML9.1 on raid 0 system.
Need a single drive on the second channel or seperate ide port.
Install standard 9.1 to this.
Down grade the makinitrd to that which comes with 9.0
install the kernel in 9.1 plus install the boot kernel with 9.1
use the source listed above to build against the standard 13mdk kernel.
Then run the fixscript from linmodems (fixes kernel symbol mismatches ) against this object file.
Then use the fix disk script that comes with the install disk to make an STATIC initrd and save this for later (needed to boot system after install)
Now boot using the boot kernel. Use your FastTrak.o file from the previous kernel to match against and use fixscript - this gives you the boot module for boot time - you then need to copy this from a floppy and do a usr/bin/insmod_ /tmp/FastTrak.o