promise SATA troubles.....

[maddphunkster]

okay here's the deal... I'm trying to install gentoo on my buddy's system. He's got an Asus K8V Deluxe mobo with a Promise 20378 SATA RAID Controler. I believe he set up RAID 0+1 with two WD HD's and has it divided up into 7 partitions. Windoze2k is already installed and i didn''t wanna screw anything of his up. I put an old ide hard disc in there and there's a shiny new gentoo system sitting on it but i can't see the whole RAID array from within gentoo. In /dev there is a ataraid/ subfolder and the two drives show up as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. The thing is, there are supposed to be 7 partitions. I see /dev/sda1 through /dev/sda5 but as for the second hard disk, there is only /dev/sdb. When i try to fdisk the drives i get error messages. I can't mount any of the /dev/sda partitions(A mix of NTFS FAT and ext2 partitons set up with Partition Magic). The logs show that the controller and both hard disks are being recognized. Please keep in mind this is my first experiece with RAID, which is why I volunteered for this(as well as to have the pleasure to use a 64-bit system for the first time). how do I get Gentoo to be able to read and write to these discs? Do i need to set up software raid and if so, will that affect Windoze? I really hope somebody can save me some headaches here and help me out

[pacmania]

Hi,

The problem resides in the fact that your friend probably activated the raid stuff from within the bios. This raid solution is not really a "hardware" solution but a software one (see other posts). This solution from the hardware manufacturer (Promise or Via) is based on proprietary (raid) software and therefore is not open or incorporated into the Linux kernel.
Your best bet is to (if it is possible, i'm not sure if it only works with the complete hdd's) disable the raid option for the partitions you want to use under Linux (Gentoo) and use the software raid the kernel provides.

Hope this helps and lets you get rid of the headaches

CU
PacMania