[Borris]

Help, newbe here. got mandrake 9.0, and for some reason its not deticting my raid card, yet on the first stage instal, it names my hard disk.
the raid card is a highpoint hpt372 udma ata133 raid controller.

on the instalation it gets just past the keyboard check and just dose nothing after that.
help !!

thanks
Borris

[Vermyn]

There are bigtime problems with that RAID setup and Mandrake 9.0. I have an Asus P4B533-E motherboard and it was nearly impossible to run on Mandrake 9.0. The CD drives wouldn't work mainly... but aside from that, forget about DMA. I could at least see the hard drive but it ran at a measly 2.5mb/sec. I ended up blowing it away and going with Red Hat 8.0, which has no problems with it.

[clutch]

Borris:

Setting up RAID in Linux is generally not recommended for a first timer. I would suggest hitting google and using keywords like "how to setup raid mandrake hpt372" or something similar. Or, just hit there forums and see if someone has posted a specific how-to on it.

Vermyn:

I have a P4PE at home, and our DMA issues reside with the kernel and not necessarily with the distro. The vanilla 2.4.20 sources and better seem to have addressed this for me, whereas before I would have to disable PCI collision detection to restore proper speed in the kernel source before compile. RH probably just had a patched driver at the time, while Mandrake may have been relying on the kernel source to deal with that.

[Vermyn]

Hey Clutch...

Yeah, my research indicated the same thing. I tried many rounds of patching and recompiling the 2.4.20 kernel, but I just couldn't get the damn thing to boot after compiling. I'm not a Linux newbie, but I'm not good enough to know what I did wrong. I gave up and went with Red Hat for now on my workstation. As for a server OS, Mandrake handles many things very, very well and I've stuck with it on my firewall server. I would like to go back to Mandrake if they get those issues solved at some point, but for now I'm just too stupid with Linux to fix it by myself. Kinda tough to help out in the free software movement when you don't know how!

[Borris]

Well thanks for replying, it looks like its not just me who has this problem.
i recon ill just get a copy of red hat, at least that will run my raid card.

thanks for your help!!

Borris

[Yuyo]

Quote:

Well thanks for replying, it looks like its not just me who has this problem.
i recon ill just get a copy of red hat, at least that will run my raid card.

thanks for your help!!

Borris

Actually, this is a Kernel problem and not a Mandrake or Red Hat specific problem. At least, that is what I was able to find out in the installation of an Epox EP-8K9A2.

It is possible to install Mandrake by removing power to the Raid drives upon installation. After installation, you will have to boot into Mandrake, change lilo to point to the new location of your /root and /home partitions, as these get remapped once you plug in the HPT372 drives. You will also need to redo your fstab to make sure that the mount points point to where things really are.

What do I mean by remapped, you ask? If your root partition is hda5 upon installation, it may become hde5 once you plug inthe HPT372 drives.


This is not difficult, but it isn't trivial if you have never done it before. This is a workaround and not a fix. The real source of this problem is the failure of motherboard makers to offer appropriate free drives with their motherboards.

If you are serious about IDE RAID card, get a 3ware card. They are well supported by one of the biggest storage companies in the world.

Keep in mind that Linux has outstanding software raid, which in most instances outperfoms what the highpoint controllers can provide.

Good luck,

Yuyo

[Aragorn!]

9.0 doesn't support the HPt37x controller natively with the 2.4.19 Kernel, you need a compiled kernel to install. I tried this but gave up as my USB mouse kept dying.
The 2.4.20 Kernel does support the HPT37x and 9.1 is using the 2.4.21 Kernel so if you feel brave enough you could download 9.1 Beta 2.
I have done this myself but still can't install it onto my system as it doesn't like my partition tables for some reason....