Booting from fasttrak 100

[adfrex]

Hi,
Ive just installed a gentoo server with a fasttrak 100 raid card and while I have compiles both the RAID components "Support for IDE RAID controllers" and "Support for Promise software RAID (Fasttrak)" built into the kernel is doesnt work.

More specifically I can boot no problem and /dev/ataraid/disc0/part3 is mounted as root, however /dev/ataraid does not exist and hence I cannot mount the boot partition or any other partition on the raid.

Any suggestions? Do I have to create nodes in the devfsd.conf. I noticed during install the while after I had modprobed the ataraid and pdcraid modules /dev/ataraid became available in the host system but during the install I had to mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev so I was able to install lilo.

any help is welcome

THX

[cyrillic]

Are you using gentoo-sources ?
I was not able to get ataraid working properly with gentoo-sources, so I switched to ac-sources.
Also, do not install your bootloader from the chroot environment, use a rescue floppy for your first boot, then install lilo or grub from your already running system.

[adfrex]

Well Ive now got it working with the gentoo sources (as you so correctly guessed). Ive now got the dev entries and everything seems to be working fine - HOWEVER - Im sort of scared about compiling my kernel again in case I indeed have to boot from floppy. I still dont understand how it could happen that the device did not exist and yet I had it listed in my mtab.

Thanks anyway

[cyrillic]

One thing I noticed with ataraid :
The name of the device node changes when you mount devfs.

/dev/ataraid/d0p3 with devfs NOT mounted.
/dev/ataraid/disc0/part3 after devfs is mounted.

This gave me trouble when I first started using ataraid.

[behd]

hehehe thanks for the tip, Ciryllic, you spared me lot of debugging time...