9.2 & RAID Install
 

Someone Please help me lol. I have been trying forever to get a distro that supports my system the best. I'm running Nforce 2 chipset, SI3112 Raid controller and ATI 9700p. I decided mandrake 9.2 would be the best. I am going to stick with.

I need some serious help installing mandrake on a SATA RAID 0 configuration. Can someone please help me???

Mandrake recognized the drives (of course) as 2 seperate drives. Is there a command to get them to be recognized as RAID 0? Silicon Image doesn't have a driver for the specific Mandrake 9.2, nor does it have anything close to that, the closest it has is a pre-compiled version of the driver for SuSE 8.2 and Redhat 9. No source driver. I thougth maybe I could get it to work by using the Redhat driver, in mandrake when you are prompted for a driver disk it has to be in the ext2 fs in order to work, non of which Silicon image's drivers are. Can someone Please help me or send me in a good direction to get this worked out. Any help would be Greatly appreciated.

Also, anyone who knows a lot about RAID on the SI3112 and Redhat 9 or SUse 8.2 let me know, I need to learn how to upgrade my kernel to 2.4.22 and keep my RAID config (it's way harder than it should be, the driver is a proprietary custom installed driver that needs to be installed on the Initial install of the system.) S

Someone please help, I'll pay you 20 bucks even. :)

Thx

Please someone consider helping me? lol :)

PLEASE

HELP AT ONCE

dude, ive got the same problem.
same controller, pretty similar setup however yr luckier than me
i cant even partiton, cfdisk just says "ERROR CANNOT ACCESS HDD"
they are there as hde and hdg
apperntly you need something like Medley software raid driver, altough i havent been able to get it to work for me

No use!!! I'm feeling the same troubles and nobody try to help... Strange is that I already installed Mandrake9.1 on my SATA, but after change my M.Board it seems all Mandrake get off.

So n news from ur side plse share with us, I will do the same.



Rgds

Jose
Moz
:mad:

There is a patch that you can download here:

http://www.infowares.com/linux/

I think they also posted a couple of modules that you can "modprobe" in order to load. I applied the patch to kernel 2.4.22 and was able to mount my Raid0 array on an Abit NF7-S as /dev/ataraid/d0p1 after compiling the kernel (which in an of itself is a trick). If the modules (ataraid.o) work, you might be able to get away without compiling a kernel, but I think it has to be a 2.4.2x at a minimum (which is in Mandrake 9.2 but not 9.1).

Good luck. If I can help you any more, let me know.

Tnx pall ur the 1 !!

I will try and let u know....




Jose

Moz
:study:

hey thanks alot man.

Do you know why I get an error when I try to compile a new kernel saying that module sii6512 is not found (the same as 3112) and how I can get by that?

just wondering..

Thanks a lot.

Assuming you applied the medley_raid patch prior to compiling the kernel, the only other thing I can think of that would cause that would be having selected the wrong options when configuring the kernel prior to compiling it. From memory I can't recall exactly which options I selected, but if you post the ones you selected, I might be able to tell you if you selected one that you shouldn't have.

Well - let me start over becaues I want to use the Medley drivers.

How can I use the drivers supplied to install linux? It's obviously not a driver disk and they are made for kernel 2.4.22 which doesn't make it easy becaue I have kernel 2.4.20 and they don't load properly.

Being that my system is up and using Grub (going to swtich to Lilo as soon as I can figure out how to do it without re-installing) I need to patch my source directory of kernel 2.4.22 right? (how do i do that lol) Than I do the normal recompile, but I shouldn't do make install right? should it be like this?

make menuconfig, make dep, make clean, make bzImage, make modules, make modules_install, than copy the bzImage over and system.map and than make an initrd? (however I do that)

man I am so lost - if you could just let me know what I'm missing, or just tell me how in the world I can get kernel 2.4.22 up on my redhat 9 2.4.20 system with grug : /

I'll pay you 20 bucks. :)
thx for the help you have given me so far.

Ok. Let's start at the beginning. At least you have a running system, so we can use that to rebuild a kernel that will support your Raid setup, and then you can move your O/S to the raid array.

1. Download the 2.4.22 kernel source (full) and untar it in /usr/src
2. Put a copy of the medley raid patch (k7_tune_medleyraid.patch) in /usr/src too.
3. Make yourself root (su & password)
4. Now type the following commands in order:

cd /usr/src/linux-2.4.22
patch -p1 < ../k7_tune_medleyraid.patch (or whatever you named the patch file)
make mrproper
make menuconfig (or make xconfig - and configure the kernel.)

You might be able to load and use the config file from your existing kernel and then only have to make changes to the Raid stuff. Unfortunately it is a bit too involved for me to step you through all of the config options, but there are lots of postings about that. Alternately I could email you a pretty basic, stripped down config file. Let me know.

Then type:

make dep
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install

Now, rather than typing "make install", we're going to do that part manually so that you still have a workable system if things go wrong. So type:

cd arch/i386/boot
mv bzImage bzImage2422
cp bzImage2422 /boot
/sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd2422

Now, since I don't use grub I can't tell you exactly what to put into your grub file, but essentially you want to tell it that your boot image is bzImage2422, and that your new initrd file is called initrd2422. Then you should be able to boot into your new kernel.

Now you need to create a stub on which to mount your Raid array. So type:

mkdir /mnt/raid

Then you need to mount the array by typing:

mount -t filetype /dev/ataraid/d0p1 /mnt/raid (substituting the correct filetype where I typed "filetype". For example, if it is an NTFS partition, it would be:

mount -t ntfs /dev/ataraid...etc.

Assuming that worked, the next thing you are going to want to do is copy your entire linux install to your raid array and edit grub again to tell it that is your root disk. Then and only then, if it works, send $20.00 to your favorite charity in my name.

Man you are great FallGuy - Thank you so much for all you help.

I will try all the above that you told me to do and tell you how it goes.

Again, thank you so much for your help.

Ok, and sorry that I have to keep bugging you but first of all, my system is installed on RAID (using si's method - totally wacky, and is probably the cause of the error message in doing make intall that I was talking about) and so I don't know if that changes anything or not, let me know.

Alright, I did everything you said and it seemed as though it went through fine untill I got to the mkinitrd part. I do "mkinitrd /boot/initrd2422" and nothing happens, it just gives me the help screen as if you typed something wrong, if you know what I'm talking about, not the help screen but same as going --help, so I don't think that it was going, that and the fact that there is not initrd2422 in my boot dir.

Let's see, I don't have to copy my system to a RAID part. so that is irrelevent. Do I need to copy system.map or anything else over to the /boot dir?

Anything other help would be greatly appreciated as always.

Thank you

Hmmm. The mkinitrd command is only looking for a place to put the finished file when it's through. So just typing "/sbin/initrd" plus a space plus the destination for the finished file "/boot/initrd2422" should work. I guess there could be a new version of the command that is expecting something else though. Let me look at in under Linux later tonight and I'll see if I can figure out what is going wrong.

thanks for the help, i got the same ideas from some friends and proceeded to try.
i was using make menuconfig to build my new kernel and the new driver was on the list(the visual kernel setup), and i screwed up, so i quit, did a few other things and started again, and now that new drivers not there! argh!
i tried patching it again, even d/l'd a brand new vanilla kernel and patching it, but it still wont show up!
ideas?

Ok, Thank you. You said to do mkinitrd - should I have done initrd? I'll give it a whirl. Hey, thanks again for all your help. Your awesome.

Sorry this took so long. I figured out what I left out of the command line. First, type the commands I have shown below in green (as root):

[root@fallnet linux-2.4.22]# ls /lib/modules/

The output will be something like this:

[root@fallnet linux-2.4.22]# ls /lib/modules/
2.4.22/ fglrx/
[root@fallnet linux-2.4.22]#

Remember the name of the kernel directory that contains the modules from your most recent compilation. In this example that directory is "2.4.22", but yours may be different. The name of this directory needs to be added to the end of the mkinitrd command line. (For consistency with Mandrake's naming scheme, I think you should also add ".img" to the end of the filename you are creating.) So in the case above, the correct command would be:

[root@fallnet linux-2.4.22]# /sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd2422.img 2.4.22

That should compile a new initrd2422.img file in your /boot directory. You will need to then edit your grub file to reflect the name of your new kernel image and the new initrd file. In Lilo, it would look like this:

image=/boot/bzImage2422
label="Linux 2.4.22"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd2422.img
append= ...[whatever], etc.

Let me know if this works for you. If you are confused by anything, let me know and I'll try to explain it another way.

Thanks a lot. One things I forgot to point out somewhere in the beggining was that I had given up on Mandrake 9.2 because I couldn't find the appropriate driver to install my RAID system on. I've been using RedHat 9. Is there any reason to be using Mandrake, the only reason I was going to was becuase of the embedded 2.4.22 kernel - I think that upgrading RedHat's default 2.4.20-8 kernel to .22 would be prime for me as I have liked RedHat better out of the few distros I've tried.

I'm at work right now so I won't be able to give that a try but I will and I'll let you know how it goes. I'm pretty sure RedHat and Mandrake won't be very different in terms of the commands right? Basically the same thing anyway.

Alright I need to get going, I'll talk to you later.

Thank you.

Ok - I tried the mkinitrd command and it returned:
"no mudules sii6512 found for kernel 2.4.22"

I suppose this is the driver that I used to install RedHat on my system in the first place. Does it reside in the 2.4.20-8 directory? I'm pretty sure it isn't there anymore because I have tried to recompile 2.4.20-8, no luck. Can I rename a module or something to sii6512 - Grr.... I would do anything to get this to work. Sorry to bug you, if you can help than great, if not, don't sweat it.

Thx again

I really don't know much about Red Hat, other than they do seem to do a number of things differently than everyone else. Hopefully you will find some helpful people in the Red Hat forum that can get you farther than I was able to.

hmm, maybe I will try Mandrake again - I can't loose your support, your the best I've had! :) - Is there a way you know of to get my system installed on to my RAID 0 array using mandrake? If you could help that would be great !

I have done it on Suse 9.0 with a SATA RAID on a card equipped with the VIA chip set.

You may find some ideas to build on from my HOWTO

http://www.le-foll.demon.co.uk/linux