Installing to drive on HPT374

[maj]

hi,

been reading the forums looking for info on how to install gentoo onto a drive attached to a HPT374 controller

the drives are not in a raid array, they are just attached to the raid channels - tis really annoying, there are plenty of threads concerning installing to highpoint controllers, but none have helped me.. ie insmod ataraid followed by insmod hptraid returns an error, checking dmesg shows hptraid was unable to find a raid drive!

there are sources avail from the highpoint website but in the readme it says they are for hpt370, 372 and 372A, i could assume that it was written before the 374 was releasd, but i dont want to hose my drives by using an incompatable driver!!

the gentoo 1.4 cd boots but is unable to see any of my drives and thus i cannot install

any help would be appreciated!

[planet323]

If you just want to use the HPT374 as an ide controller, you haven't got a raid device, just a normal disk. So insmod ataraid and hptraid is the wrong approach.

What should work, but doesn't, is to use the HPT374 as another IDE controller. My machine has a HPT372 with attached disks in software raid and that's what I do.

However, the stable kernels up to 2.4.19 don't really know about the HPT372 and above, so it doesn't just work. It appears that the gentoo kernel doesn't know about them either. (At least they didn't when I installed fairly recently.) Once you're running, you might have some luck with the lolo kernel. See this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=21621

But that doesn't help you install. I installed from my working SuSE partition. I created a new partition for Gentoo's root partition, made a file system on it, copied the needed files from the CD, chroot'ed and was on my way. This procedure is explained in The Gentoo Alternative Installation Guide (available from the Gentoo Documentation page).

I'm still using my old OS patched to know about the HPT372, so I can't be more helpful about whether the lolo sources work, but if you have a kernel that knows about the hpt374 somewhere else you might be able to make some progress.

Best of luck,
Planet.

[maj]

there was a way that i used to trick a slackware install into using a hpt366 back in the day detailed on this site i can boot the cd and do the cat /proc/pci step to get the right values for ide2,ide3,ide4 and ide5 but the gentoo install cd doesnt allow for passing of parabeters to the boot kernel.... any ideas on how i can get the kernel to listen to me??

cheers