Nope I'm not a 3ware employee, and I have never received any gratis merchandise from them. But I can be bought

It took me ages to get the SX6000 working - what a crap card, from a totally crap company.

My advice to anyone considering getting a Promise card: don't bother - get a 3ware card. Fully supported in FreeBSD and Linux.

I finally managed to get the SX6000 working under an old version of Turbo Linux as per the promise readme for the TurboLinux drivers, so i could boot from the array. That allowed me to build up Linux From Scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) onto another partition - it's not easy, you have to create a initrd image (using bootbox iirc), and compile the SX6000 source driver (which is easier said than done).

The result seems to be stable - the box was up 130 days (It's used as an NFS server) before a disk failure - the array was beeping, so I shut the machine down, replaced the failed disk, turned it back on, and it rebuilt the array. So not all bad.

If you can get it working it seems to do it's job, but I would far rather have used FreeBSD than Linux.

In FreeBSD the i2o driver generates a load of kernel message errors, and of course installing it to the array during set up is a mission in itself - no pst device files, and no built in support for the pst driver. It just didn't seem safe using the card in FreeBSD. I doubt much has changed in the past 150 odd days its been since I tried it in FreeBSD.

Indeed, I notice there are no new drivers for the card on Promise's website - no new linux drivers since March 2002. It's now April 2003. What a shit company.

I hate promise and I swear I'll never buy another promise card. Unfortunately getting 3ware cards in the UK is exceedingly difficult - looks like I'll just have to buy them from the US.

I managed to find a 3ware supplier, www.tmc-uk.com. I got the impression that they weren't really setup as a retail supplier, but I was ordering for a personal business anyway. Worst case they'll tell you which retailers they supply.

They had the 7500-8's in stock as well, from order to delivery in 3 days, and they were moving offices at the time!


Steven

I started writing some instructions for installing Mandrake 9.1 to boot from a Promise SX6000. It will answer some of the questions here but in the end of the day, after I finish the install and reboot. I am stuck with:
Kernel Panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
Help would be apreciated.

Also the support people at Promise sent me a the source of a new driver that they are very slowly working on. - My instructions assume the new source.

Here are the links:

Instructions
http://lobster.ls.huji.ac.il/~chaim/...ice_Module.txt

Source
http://lobster.ls.huji.ac.il/~chaim/....34.0.1.tar.gz

Regarding the WD WD1800JB+ drives going offline. It turns out that it is a WD problem not a Promise one. WD has a firmware upgrade for the drives. Promise of course is so clueless that they haven't even posted a revision of their warning. I bought six of these drives so I searched harder then they did.

Promise's support is definitely sub-standard but maybe we can salvage our investment somehow if we work together.

So they kind of have a kludged driver. Interesting. I trust that it won't have the same behavioral problems that the RH7.3 build did.

Are there any user-space tools yet?

Oh yeah..

I completely forgot. They also sent me some newer Redhat drivers and an RPM for some kind of monitoring tool. I point out that I have not touched the RH drivers, or the monitoring tool as the system does not boot up fully, yet. Here they are anyway. Please post results. I have no idea why Promise hasn't posted any of this new stuff to their site. Do they have another site or an FTP site anywhere? I got this stuff from their Asian office.

Redhat 7.3 drivers
http://lobster.ls.huji.ac.il/~chaim/....34.0.1.tar.gz

Redhat 8.0 drivers
http://lobster.ls.huji.ac.il/~chaim/....34.0.1.tar.gz

Raidapi Monitoring Tool
http://lobster.ls.huji.ac.il/~chaim/...1.4.0.1.tar.gz

Any ideas how I can get my system past the "Kernel Panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel." message that I get on boot?

how to install the debian system on a sx6000 RAID card
the currrent problem i'm faceing is that i can't link to the sx6000 RAID, so i can not see the harddisk with the card right now

how to instert the module for sx6000 before installing the debian system?

can anyone help?

Hi there,

did any one of you get the promise SX 6000 finally to boot any Linux or FreebSD distribution?
I have FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE tried and it does not partition the disk array right so tghat it is unable to install on the RAID.

thanks for any information!
Greets,
Sebi

I did

SuSE Linux 8.2 with driver image disc from http://www.promise.com/support/downl...wnload_eng.asp worked incredibly easy. No problems at all. Works fine for my database server. But my second server is equipped with a 3ware 7506-4LP and this works finer

Oh yeah, after you do this, and before you shutdown, do a mk_initrd. . . that will compile and deploy the modules; then restart.

Right now I'm getting:

i2o: Checking for PCI I20 controllers...
PCI: Found IRQ 5 for device 00:09.1
PCI: Sharing IRQ 5 with 00:10.2
i2o: 1 I20 controller found and installed
Activating I20 controllers...
This may take several minutes i there are many devices
i2o/iop0: Reset Rejected, trying to clear
i2o/iop0: SysTab setup timed out.
i2o/iop0: Get status timeout.
i2o/iop0: Get status timeout.
i2o/iop0: Get status timeout.
I0P reset timeout.

Any ideas?