Need Help Bad W/ Promise FastTrak RAID 0

[paulisdead]

If anyone can help me with this, you're a God! I've installed Gentoo 1.1a twice onto a RAID 0 stripe (Promise FastTrak Tx2 w/ 2 Maxtor 40GB UDMA 100 hard drives), and it works perfectly for about a week, and then suddenly I'll be starting up my computer and get a "kernel panic: VFS Unable to mount root partition," when it tries to mount the root file system, and the install dies. I can't even mount the partition booting off of the Gentoo CD. Both times were stage 1 installs also. I've got a dual boot with win2k on part 1 (NTFS), a fat32 partition as part 5, a partition for / usr/src on part 6, the swap partition is part 7, and the root partition is part 8. The root filesystem is 41.4GB, and was created with this command,

mkfs.xfs -d agcount=11 -l size=32m /dev/ataraid/disc0/part8

and is mounted with noatime,nodiratime,osyncisdsync

I figured the first install had died because something had gone horribly wrong with compiling KDE 3.0, since it had been horribly buggy and it was right after KDE had totally locked up Linux to the point I was reaching for the power button, that I got the first kernel panic. However, the second install ran flawlessly and gave no signs of failure until last night. Also here's my lilo.conf file

prompt
timeout=70
default=Linux
boot=/dev/ataraid/disc0/disc
map=/boot/System.map
install=/boot/boot.b
message=/boot/message
lba32
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.19
label=Linux
read-only
root=/dev/ataraid/disc0/part8
append="hdc=ide-scsi"
other=/dev/ataraid/disc0/part1
optional
label=Win2k

Now I'm guessing I'm either mounting or creating the filesystem incorrectly, or something might not be quite right with my lilo.conf file. I don't think the array or controller itself is causing the failure, since win2k hasn't had any of these problems. Does anyone has any ideas on how to keep this stable? Thanks in advance.

[c_kuzmanic]

Hi,

I use a fasttrack controller on my board. Configuration's a bit tricky, make sure that you have configured it properly in your kernel. There''s an option in the kernel configuration in the fasttrack section called "Special Fasttrak feature" If you enable this feature, the promise bios will override your system bios and it will cause your drives to be detected in reverse, which may be out of sync with how you set them up in lilo/fstab. If that's the case you can either a) compile your kernel NOT to use that feature, since it's not much use anyway or if you do not want to re-configure your kernel, b) you can pass ide=reverse as a boot option to lilo, which will cause the drives to be detected in reverse order.

Hope this helps.

[paulisdead]

That's kinda odd that the fastTrak special feature causes the drives to be detected in reverse, I didn't know that. Since you say it's not much use I guess I'll just build the kernel without it, since I have to reinstall the whole thing since the filesystem's hosed. It's too bad that I won't really know if this will fix it for a week, and if this happens again I'm switching to RAID 1 or dumping RAID altogether. I'm going to do a stage3 install since I've already gone through 2 stage1 installs this month.