I am a Linux newbie who would very much like to set up a dual-boot machine. Preventing me from doing this is the infamous Promise FastTrak 378 "RAID controller" aboard the ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard. Here is the current status of my configuration:
- Two 80GB SATA hard drives are linked together in a RAID-1 configuration using the FastTrak controller.
- The RAID drive is partitioned into two 40GB partitions, both of which currently have NTFS filesystems.
The second partition is completely empty, and that is where I want to install a Linux - any distro will do, although as a newbie I'd prefer something no more complex than Gentoo (which I managed to install on another computer which has since died). Having had bad experiences with failing hard drives in the past, I would vastly prefer to have both my operating systems on RAID-1 drives.
I am currently booted into Knoppix 3.7 using the knoppix26 boot option. uname returns:
Linux Knoppix 2.6.9 #2 SMP Tue Oct 19 23:51:10 CEST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
lspci has this to say about my RAID controller:
0000:02:04.0 RAID bus controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20378 (FastTrak 378/SATA 378) (rev 02)
Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc. PC-DL Deluxe motherboard
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 96 (1000ns min, 4500ns max), Cache Line Size: 0x90 (576 bytes)
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 23
Region 0: I/O ports at df00 [size=64]
Region 1: I/O ports at dfa0 [size=16]
Region 2: I/O ports at d880 [size=128]
Region 3: Memory at feafe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
Region 4: Memory at feac0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1+ D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
As I see it, I have two ways to try to get to where I want to be.
1. In Windows mode, use the FastTrak RAID capability to access the first partition of the RAID-1 drive. In Linux mode, access the second partition of each drive individually without using the FastTrak RAID, then use Linux software RAID to join them into a RAID-1 drive.
2. Find some Linux driver that will allow me to use the FastTrak RAID chip. Googling seems to indicate that Promise does not have a Linux driver available for kernel 2.6, but I have heard a few mentions of a sil_promise driver that seems to handle the Promise RAID controller.
In any case, my first step is to try and mount my SATA drives under Knoppix. They seem to show up as scsi0 and scsi1 at boot, although I don't know how to recall messages written during bootup. I would appreciate any help you can offer.
