I'm trying to boost the performance of my server. The old IDE controller just don't do some of the drives justice.
Anyway, it's an old Compaq deskpro-something with a total of 4 drives in it, connected to the IDE controller on the motherboard.

10gb IBM = hda (boot)
3 120gb Seagate hd(b)/c/d

Whenever I reboot my system the IDE controller (on the motherboard) reports the 120gb drives as 60gb drives and I only have about 4-5Mb/sec trasfer rates between the drives. I've got a Silicon Image based RAID card that I would like to use. The only problem is that whenever I install the card, slackware won't boot.

.. and that happens even if I just install the card physically in the computer, without connecting any drives to it. The kernel has compiled support for CMD64x and SIIMAGE based controllers..

I installed the card into another box (years ago) and installed slackware with the boot drive attached to the RAID controller, which worked without a hitch. But, and this is a big but, I'm almost 100% sure my boot device was named /dev/hde instead of /dev/hda.

I'm guessing the RAID card somehow takes precedence over the built-in IDE controller and I tried some combinations of "root = /dev/hda1" but it just said something about "missing image", if my memory serves me correct.

How could I fix this?
Any and all suggestions would be appreciated!

What raid controller is it? Raid controllers are usually /dev/sda or /dev/rd/c0d0 or something similar. You have to make sure your fstan and lilo are set up properly to use raid

I'm really sorry.. I should have pointed out that it is just a regular IDE controller with RAID capabilities. The manuafacturer is Q-tec and the model is 340R. The chipset is Sil0680. The RAID is not important, I would just like for my box to actually start the OS with the card installed in it, without screaming about kernel panic.

http://www.qtec.info/products/product.htm?artnr=13237

Before the actual kernel panic is says
Could someone give me an example of how to change the "root=" boot option at the lilo screen? I just want the OS to be able to boot with the card installed NOT using any RAID capabilities and without ANY drives attached to it.

I'm really sorry for not being clear.

I have an ordinary Ultra ATA controller from Promise and the drive connected to it is hde.

So you should try a boot parameter like root=/dev/hdeX.

But this is just a guess.

Yeah, it's weird since even though I only install the card in the box, without any drives connected to it, it won't boot.

It almost seems like the newly installed IDE/RAID controller switches the device names with the onboard IDE controller. So /dev/hd(a)/b/c/d on the motherboard becomes hd(e)/f/g/h. I'll have to try give it the root parameter you suggested later today.

Thanks!

I have an ITE8212 RAID card in one of my machines, slackware booted and installed using a standard kernel on 10.2 (cant remember which one, but it wasnt bare.i!)

With regards to the device being /dev/hde, there was some changes made so that the raid starts at /dev/hda and the onboard controller starts at /dev/hde, so my primary master controller (my cdrom) is now /dev/hde and my raid card is /dev/hda

if it won't boot, is it possible that there is an IRQ issue / conflict and maybe you should try another pci slot?

Yes, this is exactly what I was looking for. So, it IS possible for it to change the device names. It's not just my imagination

I'll give it the root parameter of
.. and we'll see what happens. Hopefully I'll be able to at least get the OS up and running.
It shares IRQ 7 with the graphics card, but I have tried it in different slots and I can choose between it conflicting with either one of my nics or the graphics card.

I just did some experimenting with another box. Luckily I found a centos installation on one of my drives and got it running on another machine. When I installed the card by itself and booted centos it just went straight to the desktop. lspci showed the card was recognized correctly. I installed a drive onto the IDE/RAID controller and it was recognized as hde/hde1 from /proc/partitions.

Too bad I can't just rip the cords from my server since other people are depending on it being up and running, but my fingers are itching to try setting the root partition to hde1.

Hopefully I'll post an update later today.

Nope, it won't work. Damn..

I tried appending the root partition to the lilo prompt and although I got a little further it just complains about not finding a block-major/major-block on /dev/hda1, even though I specified /dev/hde1. Is it still reading the lines from fstab..?

I don't feel comfortable editing it without knowing exactly what happens when I install the IDE/RAID controller in my box.

Does anyone have any more ideas? My hope was to be able to get things running and I would then ghost/image the drive onto another (newer) drive and everything would be fine. Although, it seems that my old Slackware 9.1 could could use an upgrade.

Anything else I could try? Please let me know!

try booting up off of a "slax" cd. then do the "lspci" and "lsmod" to see what it shows. since slax uses slackware this should really give you a good idea, it's helped me many times. it's not the easiest solution I know, but I'm new so I tend to do things the hard way but it's an option.