HowTo setup a Promise FastTrack Raid Controller

-leliel-

HowTo setup a Promise FastTrack Raid Controller

just a little howto to get a promise fasttrack controller working (with grub and kernel 2.4.20).

1. Kernel Stuff

You should be sure to enable the following settings:

seezer · n00b Joined: 06 Jul 2002 Posts: 3 Location: Germany

I just installed mine yesterday and i don't use any grub settings ( but works perfectly

)

MooktaKiNG · Guru Joined: 11 Nov 2002 Posts: 326 Location: London, UK

What if you want to use grub to start gentoo which is in a raid partition disc0/part1?

How would you configure that?
_________________
http://www.mooktakim.com
Athlon XP 2001, Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP MB, 640Mb DDR RAM 333MHz, MSI Geforce 4800SE 128Mb DDR, 40x12x48 Liteon CDRW drive, Flower Cooler, ADSL Router

Lovechild · Posted: Sat May 24, 2003 10:46 am Post subject:

please note that ide-raid has not been ported to kernel 2.5 yet.. so going for a ideraid setup like the fasttrack controller will cut you off from 2.5 testing.

MooktaKiNG · Guru Joined: 11 Nov 2002 Posts: 326 Location: London, UK

when will 2.5 become stable?
_________________
http://www.mooktakim.com
Athlon XP 2001, Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP MB, 640Mb DDR RAM 333MHz, MSI Geforce 4800SE 128Mb DDR, 40x12x48 Liteon CDRW drive, Flower Cooler, ADSL Router

Lovechild · Posted: Sat May 24, 2003 11:46 am Post subject:

mortado · Posted: Sat May 24, 2003 12:22 pm Post subject:

What about Promise's source [url] http://www.promise.com/support/download/download2_eng.asp?productId=88&category=driver&os=100[/url] Anyone care to try out? Or even better: hack it into kernel tree so that we, who wish to boot from FastTrak don't have to play with modules and initial ramdisks.

I've been struggling with two FastTrak TX2000 (PDC20271) controllers at work and now that I finally found the URL, it's Saturday and I can't wait to get my hands back on the system.

My experiences with livecd 1.4_rc4 so far have been similar with you people, for example http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=52767 ide=nodma did boot up but still crashes fdisk as I push w(rite). I finally gave up with livecd and emerged system using an extra HDD connected to mobo's standard IDE and everything is rock solid except controllers do not show up.

Kernels tried so far are vanilla 2.4.20, then with Andre Hedrick's IDE-patches (2.4.21-pre4) included and finally gentoo sources 2.4.20-r5, and none of these have been a success. If I compile ataraid and pdcraid as modules and modprobe pdcraid I get 'no such device'.

The system is a P-III duallie running SMP-kernel, 2 x PDC20271 and 4 x Maxtor 120 GB all single masters per channel. RAID level 1+0 as by combining multiple FT's you get a single controller look & feel with more channels all in same BIOS. Needless to say, this is no hardware flaw as I first did a test run using XP Pro with no problems at all. With the exception of heavily fragmented >240 gigabyte C:-drive

endu · n00b Joined: 03 Jul 2003 Posts: 18 Location: CH

hi
thanks for this how-to but it didn't work
i have a Promise Ultra133 controller and a Promise Fasttrak tx2000 controller.

the ultra- controller becomes ide2 and ide3 (ide0 and ide1 is the onboard controller) but the fasttrak controller nothing; neither /dev/ataraid/... nor /proc/ide/ideX. (I compiled the fasttrak support into the kernel).

so i added ide4= and ide5= with the numbers according to the output of "cat /proc/pci" in the grup.conf (as described in your how-to)

now, after booting, there seems to be still the same IDE- setup with no ataraid.

dmesg shows this:
Kernel command line: root=/dev/hdb6 ide4="0xbc00,0xc002" ide5="0xc400,0xc802"
ide_setup: ide4="0xbc00,0xc002" -- BAD OPTION
ide_setup: ide5="0xc400,0xc802" -- BAD OPTION

has anybody any suggestions where the problem could be?

thank you
endu

oh yeah, i fixed it. the parameters
ide4="0xbc00,0xc002" ide5="0xc400,0xc802"
should be
ide4=0xbc00,0xc002 ide5=0xc400,0xc802
(without the "")
have fun..