clean install of 2004.0 - silicon image hardware ata raid

[steveo]

I'm not sure exactly how to even phrase this question, but here goes:

I have four hard drives hooked up to a Silicon Image raid controller card. I have had troubles in the past getting Gentoo installed on this machine while this card was connected to the motherboard, but when I connected the hard drives straight to the motherboard and gave up on the RAID, I had no problems. The kernel that loaded (gentoo) from the LiveCD does detect the card, sort of. Here is what "cat /proc/pci" says about the card:

Bus 0, device 9, function 0:
RAID bus controller: CMD Technology Inc PCI0680 (rev 2).
IRQ 12.
Master Capable. Latency=32.
I/O at 0xc000 [0xc007].
I/O at 0xc400 [0xc403].
I/O at 0xc800 [0xc807].
I/O at 0xcc00 [0xcc03].
I/O at 0xd000 [0xd00f].
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe3000000 [0xe30000ff].

Notice it says CMD instead of SilI, but the PCI0680 is correct. When booting from the cd, I typed "gentoo doataraid" and eventually got to a command prompt. Now, how do I access my RAID array? I believe the problems I was having in the past was that I was still referring to the individual hard drives, i.e. /dev/hda, /dev/hdab, and so on. I know for the software raid that you set up /dev/md*, but I did not see any of those in /dev. I also just found this in my /proc/ide directory:

# cat /proc/ide/siimage
Controller: 0
SiI680 Chipset.
MMIO Base 0xe30000000
MMIO-DMA Base 0xe30000000
MMIO-DMA Base 0xe30000008

So again, I believe it's detecting everything properly. I did a little bit more searching in /proc and found this:

# cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/capacity
160086528

And this is correct. It shows the same number for ide0/hdb, ide1/hdc, and ide1/hdd. In the hardware raid setup, and created a 0+1 raid array for a total size of ~160GB.

Ok, so if you've made it this far in this post, does anyone have any idea how I actually access this raid array? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

[taskara]

when using "hardware" raid your device should be a single /dev/ataraid/disc

if that does not exist, then the raid driver was not loaded properly, or it can't detect your raid controller.

all raid controllers will act as an IDE device under linux unless you have the ataraid driver, which btw does NOT exist in 2.6
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[steveo]

Thanks for the reply! I don't see a /dev/ataraid directory at all, and "uname-r" displays "2.4.24-xfs-r3" for the kernel loaded off the LiveCD. Is there anything I can do to get ataraid working?

A problem I was having before, was that in /etc/fstab, I had the root partition on /dev/hda3. I kept getting a kernel panic saying it couldn't find the root partition. It seemed to me that during the LiveCD installation, the mappings for the hard drives (hda-hdd) got changed after I finally rebooted and let it boot off the hard drive (instead of the CD). Any clues where I might have gone wrong during the installation process?

Thanks a bunch,
Steve

[b45h4]

hi hi dude
if you want the ataraid working , for the moment you'll need to be using a
2.4.2x kernel of some description , atm i have the same chipset in my fileserver running 4x 80gig bara5's and it runs pretty good
to be honest don't even bother with the patches and ataraid stuff
on the live cd its more trouble than its worth and just gets you confused.
how we got it to work was to use a spare harddrive, put a linux install
on that then use that harddrive to get into the raid, by patching the kernel with the raid patch below, then mounting the raid array, and following normal gentoo install instructions from there.
[URL="http://www.infowares.com/linux"] cmd/ silicon image medley raid patch for the 2.4 kernel[URL]
when you apply that patch to the kernel, i had to give it a fuzz of 20 and change the diff's so they relate to my kernel before it ended up working ,but it does work in the end. there are other posts about this mostly relating to the silicon image sata chipset.

the reason you get confused with the output messages, like that is because the chipset stores the raid information on the first drive in the raid array, so if you looked at the first drive , it will give you the file size for the whole array, and the other drives in the array will bring back invalid partition errors in fdisk etc.
i'm not sure if you can actually get a 0+1 array going with the state of the current drivers, but i kno for sure raid 0 works.

[URL="https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=78767&highlight=medley+raid"]dan's method[URL]
dan has the same card as me and that was his way of doing it, will explain it far better i think than i ever will be able to.

our next plan was to create a livecd with a pre patched kernel that would boot and load the raidsets up automatically. but as yet we havn't got around to it.

hmm i havn't really been to much help just ranted alot there,
so if you get stuck installing off another harddrive or don't have a
spare harddrive to install off get back to me, i'll have a look around
and see if i can find another method that would work.

[arkane]