Promise FastTrak SX4000

brockmasterflex · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2005 Posts: 2

Hey guys, I'm trying to install Gentoo on this Promise card, however it can't "see" the hard drives connected to the controller.

Any ideas would be great!

-Brock

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 12:23 am Post subject:

brockmasterflex · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2005 Posts: 2

Thanks for the reply, however I still can't seem to see the drives. I boot the hard drives up, which had a previous version of Red Hat 8 on it. I checked to see what Red Hat used as a driver, according to lsmod the card used scsi_mod, so I guess I'll have to look for that.

Any other suggestions would be excellent, I don't want to put Fedora :evil:

on here, but if I can't get Gentoo installed by the weekend thats what I'll have to do :cry:

.

veggie2u · Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:24 pm Post subject:

Which version of the card are you using? Is this the ATA or SATA version? The ATA version requires 2.4 kernel and modules compiled from source.
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brendaniabbatis · Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 8:33 pm Post subject:

This post is rather old yet there is no end to the story. I'm interested because I could not get the SX4000 to work under Fedora 4.

The binary module from Promise is for the 2.4 kernel, and the partial sources that are floating around just don't want to build with current tools. That's why I'm putting Gentoo on this server instead, to get the latest 2.4 kernel for compatibility with the Promise binary module, and still install the latest OS packages.

The suggestion to use the sata_sx4 module is incorrect, because this is not an SATA card, it's a RAID card.

Is anyone else successfully using it under Linux? I'll post here with my results.

cyrillic · Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 3:33 am Post subject:

veggie2u · Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 5:53 pm Post subject:

I have given up, and purchased some plain IDE controller cards, and I am doing software raid. I have enough CPU in this box that is ok. I have gone to just mirroring instead of raid 5 though. Anyone want a raid(ish) card?
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brendaniabbatis · Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject:

brendaniabbatis · Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 7:28 pm Post subject:

The sata_sx4 module would never work because this isn't an sata card. I think there is an sata version of the card, but this isn't one.

Anyway RedHat 9 gave me the same trouble, so just to be sure I tried Windows 2000, and sure enough I'm getting errors on format under Windows as well, so in my case there is something wrong with the hardware. Otherwise I would say Gentoo Linux is an excellent solution for this card, allowing use of the 2.4 kernel with current packages. Promise really dropped the ball expecting users to stay with RedHat 9 for all eternity.

It is necessary, however, to build the module from the partial sources found here. The binary from Promise expects a specific version of the kernel. The other nice thing about using Gentoo is you can get the latest (and most stable) version of the 2.4 kernel and build the module to go with it.

BodOrange · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Apr 2003 Posts: 132

I might have one of these cards soon as part of a lot. I was wondering if I can use it, without RAID, with standard 2.6 kernel simply to connect additional hdd's?

brendaniabbatis · Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2006 5:43 pm Post subject:

keving · n00b Joined: 26 Jan 2006 Posts: 1

sirber · n00b Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 37

I got a SX4100 and I am unable to make it work. Even the module from Promise seg fault