Re: how to use promise fastTrak 378 with IDE disks?

On Sat, 2008-03-22 at 16:08 +0100, Florian Kulzer wrote:
On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 10:29:50 +0000, michael wrote:
On 21 Mar 2008, at 19:48, Florian Kulzer wrote:
On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 19:08:20 +0000, michael wrote:
On 21 Mar 2008, at 17:36, Florian Kulzer wrote:

[...]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 20:33:50 +0000, michael wrote:
I've a Asus A8V mobo which has a Promise FastTrak 378
controller,
nominally for RAID but I can set it to 'IDE mode' in the
BIOS.

[...]

Did you try to boot your system with the controller set to normal
operation (i.e. not IDE-mode) in the BIOS?

[...]

it fell over at the Grub loading stage

I think that might mean that the system recognized the FastTrak-
attached
drive(s) and tried to boot from it/them. It is, however, not clear to
me
whether it would see two separate drives under these conditions or one
drive with hardware RAID working.

If you want to investigate this further then you probably have to
switch
your entire setup to using partition labels or UUIDs, to be imune to
the
effects of /dev/hd? reshuffling (or try a liveCD as I suggested
earlier).

I'll try (later this w/end) the LiveCD - the idea being that it may have
more (modern?) drivers and thus deal with it?

Yes, and that it will always boot from the CD, irrespective of how many
drives are recognized for given BIOS setting. It seems to me that the
drive(s) attached to the promise controller were recognized in your last
experiment, but this unfortunately meant that Grub saw a different order
of drives, therefore it did not know where to find your root partition
anymore.

To illustrate this more concretely, let's say that your root partition
is on the first partition of the first hard disk. This normally means
that GRUB was installed on the master boot record of this drive and that
GRUB is configured to look for the /boot/grub directory on "(hd0,0)" to
bring up the system. (GRUB counts from zero, so "0,0" is "first drive,
first partition".) Everything worked fine, until you changed the BIOS
setting and the FastTrak-attached drives were suddenly recognized. The
Promise controller has a lower PCI address than the VIA controller; this
gives you a new "(hd0)" and the disk with your root partition is now
"(hd1)" or even "(hd2)". The BIOS will normally still find the old MBR,
simply because it can try all attached drives until it comes across one
that can boot at all, but GRUB gets lost looking for /boot/grub on the
new "(hd0,0)", especially if the new drive has not even been partitioned
yet.

This means that you will have to reconfigure GRUB in the long run, but
right now a liveCD is probably the quickest means to see what exactly is
going on and what is possible at all. (You can also enter the correct
new root designation directly at the GRUB prompt, but the liveCD has
indeed the added benefit of showing you if things improve with a newer
kernel.)


I think this article sums up the probs I've been seeing:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/solution-for-promise-fasttrack-pdc20378-pata-or-raid-with-2.6.17-kernel-478926/



Indeed if I book from GPARTed 0.3.4-8 liveCD it states "sata_promise
PATA port found" and shows me the disks (albeit as sda, sdb)... so maybe
that uses a patched sata_promise module?

I also see that Ubuntu are (if I read it right) going to include PATA
support for sata_promise:
http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/l/linux-source-2.6.20/linux-source-2.6.20_2.6.20-15.27/changelog (search for sata_promise eg at section: "linux-source-2.6.20 (2.6.20-8.14) feisty; urgency=low")

So perhaps Debian will ship a kernel with PATA support in sata_promise??

M


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