I've been having lots of fun (not) with this controller. According to the linux mafia hardware webpage this controller should be supported in libata as of 2005/04/15 but it doesn't work in my debian 3.1 installation which uses by default kernel 2.6.8-2. Is this a recent enough kernel? Perhaps I need to do something else to make it work?

I downloaded the 2.6.15.1 kernel and compiled and can see the drives on the controller and partition them and make filesystems etc. But when I reboot everything takes a dive and I loose the partitions. I was trying to use ext3. Is it possible I made a mistake configuring the kernel?

I've just kinda gone all over the place trying different things. A suggestion as to a more logical approach would be appreciated. Thanks.

Keeb

Well it seems I got it to work under ubuntu 5.10 a couple days ago. I've been waiting to see if its stable before I replied with the solution.

Short answer solution:

1) you MUST have the right software/source installed to compile a kernel for your distribution
2) d/l the appropriate driver from promise and follow the instructions in the readme to compile the driver

One point though worth mentioning now is since step 2 requires that you compile your kernel you might want to copy the config from /boot to the kernel source directory so you don't have to guess at the options. However I made my own customized monolithic kernel.

I'll post a more detailed solution when I've ironed out a few little details. Since I'm relatively new at this I don't want to post anything detailed before I'm sure I'm right.

Keeb