[ale] Linux Install failure with a Promise onboard RAID controller

Greg runman at telocity.com
Sun Sep 1 18:21:14 EDT 2002


	Situation:	I have an Asus A7V333 motherboard with an on-board Promise
FastTrak133 IDE/RAID controller that has 2 IDE slots in addition to the
normal 2 IDE slots.  On the normal on-board IDE slots I have a CD-ROM, a
CD-DVD player, a CD-RW player and an Iomega 100MB Zip drive. On the 2 RAID
slots I have set up a mirror with 2 Western Digital 100GB hard drives that
are currently dual booted into Windows 98 and Windows NT 2000.  The C
partition is Windows 98 and is FAT32.  The Windows NT 2K has 4 partitions in
NTFS.  There is about 30GB left over for a Linux  OS.

	Problem:	I cannot install Linux (Suse 8.0) on the unused partition.  My
research via Google revealed that Promise is not revealing the source of
their drivers and there is not apparently no one out there for this type of
what one guy called "pseudo RAID via a BIOS hack".  He did give some
half-hearted ways around it that he said only worked half the time.
Promise's site with a "Linux driver" is down with a 404 error.  Even when I
disconnected everything and tried it on a one of the mirrored disks plugged
into one of the normal IDE drive slots it did not work, giving me a "No HD
found" error".  When I used a brand new disk, it labeled it "/dev/ataraid"
even though RAID was not in use and the disk would not boot, looking for
something to be passed to the kernel during boot that I could not figure
out.  The CD rescue mode could boot it up sometimes (1 out of 3 tries).

	I could have sworn that when I first got this mobo I set it up as a quick
proof of concept in a tri-boot setup using the HD on a normal IDE slot and
using an image of the Linux partition in the C partition. I used the MS
bootloader to be able to boot to the Linux (SuSE 8.0) partition.

	Any one got any clues/ideas ?  Ideally I would like to keep the mirror
intact and just install Linux on the un-used part of the disk.  Would
another distro work ?

TIA

Greg C.


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