Promise PDC20276 onboard Gigabyte GA-7VRXP mobo... install no storage device
 

Hi~

As I listed in my subject, I have a Promise PDC20276 ATA133 controller onboard my Gigabyte GA-7VRXP mobo. I have a WD 80gb ATA100 HD hooked up to the promise controller. I have tried Red Hat 7.3 and Mandrake 8.2 and neither of them can find a storage device to install onto. If I plug my HD into one of the regular IDE controllers on the mobo... everything runs fine, but then I lose the benefit of ATA100 as the IDE controller is ATA33. I have 15% of my HD partitioned as my C drive for Windows98 and 70% as my D drive for just storing stuff and I left 15% unpartitioned for linux.

As I go through the installs, the hardware probe finds my onboard NIC and my PCI NIC and the graphics load fine... it gives me the option of installing other hardware or devices. Then it lists either SCSI or Network. I choose SCSI, but the Promise controller is not listed. It does say that I can press F2 to load a driver that I have from my floppy disk. I have been unable to find this driver however.

Someone's gotta now how to solve this... Thanks for your help in advance!

thundercatzlair

Kernel Oops: Everything corrupted, check next post.

Too New.

I just checked the menuconfig option of 2.4.18 and the Promise series of controls are listed up to PDC20268. The other kernel I have on my machine, 2.5.24 has support for it, but of course its a raging beta kernel. When I compiled it, the drivers for my initio scsi card killed the compile. You can install on the ata-33 channel, compile a beta tree kernel, or 2.4.19-rc1 (which has the support too), then change /etc/fstab on the drive to reflect that mount partitions are going to be on /dev/hde1 instead of /dev/hda1, this is assuming you have 2 normal ata33 ide channels and 1 ata133 channel. Also change lilo or grub to reflect the new changes, power down the machine, swap the drives, boot it up, cross your fingers.

Basically, it'll be a hastle until a distro releases on 2.4.19, which is still in release candidate stages and now that the beta series has taken off Marcello has slowed down on stable tree releases... in short, don't hold your breath, it might be a couple months before RH or Mandy or whatever gets to release on a new stable kernel.

Cheers,

Finegan

From the 2.4.19-rc1 changelog:

<marcelo@plucky.distro.conectiva> (02/03/22 1.220.1.24)
Add Promise 20276 to supported IDE controllers

Or... you can use any given machine to compile a custom kernel, make a bootdisk with it, and then install after using the bootdisk to boot to the redhat CD... There are a lot of options... none of them are simple...