i posted this on linux general with no helpful replies and i'm thinking there must be someone out there who knows this.
i need to get slackware on my compaq proliant 1500 and i've read an article made for slackware 8 but the article requires you to have spare boxes to build a compaq supporting kernel on and then make bootdisks, well a friend showed me a bootdisk from some site i think it was http://www.cpqlinux.com/cpqarray_tar.gz well now i have it and i don't know what to do with it.
could someone help me with this please?

One of the mods here recently did an install on a box like this, lemme see if he could give a few tips... he a fun time fighting with it.

Cheers,

Finegan

The problem I ran into for my Proliant 5000 is that the available slackware boot images have either the RAID controller support or the SCSI controller support. THis effectively meant that when I loaded the image to support the Compaq Smart-2/P controller I lost the use of the SCSI drive and was unable to continue with the install.

Here's how I got mine running

I'm not too sure about that bootdisk you downloaded - is it for slackware or RedHat?

After several glasses of scotch (hey - I'm on vacation!) I had more time to consider the problem.

How many drives do you have? If you have 3 or more drives and a RAID5 setup there may be a workaround for ya.

1) Create the array with the available dirves.
2) Pull a drive from the array and connect it to the onboard SCSI controller.
3) Install slack on that drive (ignore the RAID array for the moment) and include the kernel source
4) Rebuild the kernel and include the SCSI controller and RAID (Compaq Smart-x/x)
5) reboot and test the new kernel. make sure you can see the RAID array
6) Create the partitions on the array and format it with your choice of fs (I use ReiserFS, fin will tell you to use XFS)
7) Copy the entire root structure to the newly created partitions
8) Change your lilo.conf as per the cpqlinux instructions and boot to the array
9) Reboot and enjoy!
10) If all goes well you can put the drive back in the RAID array where it will be reimaged by the controller for you.