Hi all,

Due to a HD failure on an old motherboard i installed a 80GB IDE drive on a PCI IT8212 IDE/RAID card (motherboard bios supports max 20GB, no update available).
This is the only disk in the machine, I have to install Slack 10.2 on it.
I compiled driver iteraid.o on another machine using kernel 2.4.31 source, put it on a floppy, boot from cdrom (bare.i kernel), mount floppy, insert module, hard drive gets recognized (/dev/sda) ; i can make an fdisk, install Slackware on it.
But the machine won't boot due to lack of driver support for the IT8212 card.
I tried two approaches :
1st approach : compile a new 2.4.31 kernel with IT8212 support (modification of Makefile and config.in in drivers/scsi folder) ; kernel config loaded from the "bare.i" config file with only difference "IT8212F support = yes" under "SCSI low level drivers". Kernel compiles ok, i make a bzImage, put it on floppy. During install, when prompted for kernel selection, i choose kernel from floppy. At reboot, i get lilo, beginning of boot process but system hangs (and screen is "cleared - fully black" when boot hangs so i can't know when or why it hangs)
2nd approach : use bare.i kernel with iteraid.o as module loaded by an initrd. i carefully read manpages for lilo and initrd but various attempts to boot from a floppy failed. to implement initial loading of iteraid.o at system boot from hard drive, i suppose i should get system running first.

Has anybody gone the same way before? Could you hint at a way to get my system running? Any help appreciated.

With best regards,
zp

I am pretty new to RAID and have only used RAID 1. Recently I had a bad motherboard and had to get a new one. The new board - SOYO KT880 - supports IDE and SATA RAID. I had a hard time getting Slack to recognize the extra IDE controllers under kernel 2.4.

The first thing I did was to run a recent KNOPPIX, just to see if the system would pick up the IDE controllers, which it did. So then I installed Slack 2.6 and everything worked right away. Actually the Slack 2.6 kernel did a better job of identifying my hardware setup than did the KNOPPIX.

Good luck.

When you boot did you disable the on board ide controller? Are you able to turn off raid on ide card and just use it for ide? Found this discussion about ite8212 http://kerneltrap.org/node/4543. Seems like support for it is in 2.6x kernel. Check Pat's 2.6.13 kernel config file to see if the card is supported. It is available under /slackware-10.2/kernels/testing26.s on install cd or SW10.2 download page http://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux...re/...test26.s.
Sorry for problems you're having. If above doesn't help sorry and I hope better assistance is forthcoming.