Hi folks,

I have 4x 250GB SATA HDs connected to a 3Ware 9500 4LP RAID Controller. I have compiled a new kernel based on the current 2.6.11.7 downloaded from kernel.org

When booting I can see that my controller is recognized and that the 4 drives attached to the controller are recognized. However, when booting from the boot disk it seems to require additional information about which device it should use. So far I have tried...

ramdisk root=/dev/hda (cdrom drive)
ramdisk root=/dev/fd0 (boot disk)
mount root=/dev/sda (assuming array will be seen as a SCSI based drive)

The above have all been unsuccessful. I'm still relatively new to linux, and very new to linux and raid configurations to be used by linux.

I have google'd using many keywords, but found nothing which suits my situation, I have read the ATA-RAID-HowTo, 3Ware Installation Manual, 3Ware 9xxx User Manual.

the actual error I receive states;

VFS: Cannot open root device "hda" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Obviously it is requesting to know which device to use, but after trying numerous, I don't know what to specify here.

Have I missed something during the kernel configuration which is required?

Any help and general pointing in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards

TH

UPDATE:

Right, first off I'd like to update you on the fact that I have now (after much sleep) RTFM and obviously missed the necessity for rootdisks.

However, it would appear that the Slackware 10.1 iso's I downloaded do not contain the rootdisks directory. So I have had to tinker with ones from Slack 10.0, hopefully this will make no difference.

However after creating the rootdisks I have been confronted with the following error, when attempting to use a root disk.

UDF-fs: No VRS found

All the information so far I have found seems to lead toward problems with CDs rather than the good old 1.44 floppies.

Has anyone had this sort of problem before?

Regards

Toby

UPDATE:

Right then, now that I'm up and running I thought I would just let you know more about the troubles I had in getting Slackware 10.1 installed.

Firstly the ISO's I downloaded did not include directories containing rootdisks or bootdisks. I used the ones from 10.0 which worked fine.

After creating my rootdisks, booting the server with the newly compiled boot disk, which included 3Ware 9xxx support, I found that I was receiving tar bad header error messages, which seems to be intermittent.

Anyway after a large amount of rebooting and retrying the rootdisks worked. I had tried re-downloading them, recreating them by untarring and re-tarring (only worked on install.2, but then that was the only faulty one).

But the long and short is that I now appear to be fully up and running.

Regards

Toby

try /dev/rd/c0d0

thats what it is for my raid controller

Thanks for the reply.

My RAID Controller appears under /dev/sda.

Thanks all again.

T