Booting off PRomise SATA card

dhunt · n00b Joined: 11 Oct 2003 Posts: 46 Location: New Zealand

Hi,

Has any one had any experiece booting off a promise SATA card. I'm using the pdc-ultra driver to boot a Promise S ATA TX-150 plus. My drive works great if I boot off a standard IDE drive and then load the pdc-ultra module.

I've tried making a initrd to do this but when it tries to load the drive it gets all sorts of errors about missing symbols including kprint and some scsi stuff which is all built into the kernel. I'm using a standard 2.4.21 kernel

Any ideas how to get it working?

David

a.zapatista · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2003 Posts: 42

I can't help you very much with booting from the sata drive I think the module needs to be compiled in the kernel, but can i ask if you are getting any hard locks while using your sata drives? I'm using the pdc-ultra driver and seem to be getting the problem described here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/8/19/1

JATMAN · Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 9:15 pm Post subject:

I have a TYAN motherboard with dual Opterons. The board has on on-board Promise PDC20378 controller which I understand also uses the pdc-ultra driver.

I was unsuccessful in getting Gentoo 1.4 to use the 2.4.20 kernel on this board. For reasons I do not understand, every attempt to boot a gentoo-sources kernel fails in a very odd way. As the kernel is booting, it reachs a point where the IDE devices are identified (successfully) then begins to spew console output continuously which I cannot read. This continues until I reboot the machine.

I have successfully installed an mm-sources kernel on this machine which operates nicely.

My problem is that I cannot seem to compile the pdc-ultra driver and thus cannot access the nice pair of SATA drives I have in the machine. Did you have problems compiling the pdc-ultra driver? Has anyone compiled it with 2.6 vintage kernel?

dhunt · n00b Joined: 11 Oct 2003 Posts: 46 Location: New Zealand

Hi,

I haven't had any problems with hard locks at all with the pdc-ultra driver. In fact my computer hasn't crashed at all since I've installed it. The only possible problem is access seems to be a bit slower than I expected. Still reasonable speeds.

As for booting I haven't been to do this sucessfully due to fact it is a module only driver. That's why I tried to use initrd to get round that but can't seem to get that working right.

Also haven't had any problems compiling the driver. Currently running on a vanilla 2.4.21 kernel

JATMAN · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 12:44 pm Post subject:

Finally had some success. The latest ac-sources kernel both works with my TYAN motherboard and is "compatible" with the pdc-ultra driver. The onboard PDC20378 driver is now operating as are my pair of SATA drives.

I'm still interested in learning if anyone has successfully compiled a pdc-ultra driver using a 2.6 kernel.

dhunt · n00b Joined: 11 Oct 2003 Posts: 46 Location: New Zealand

are you booting off your SATA drives? If so what did u have to do to get it working or is the pdc-ultra driver build in the ac-source.

JATMAN · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 10:56 am Post subject:

I am not booting off of the SATA drives. I boot off of an ATA133 drive. The pdc-ultra driver is built as a module. I'm using the SATA drives as mount points for index and table spaces for an Oracle database I do development work on. Booting off of the SATA drives is not important for me.

The pdc-ultra driver is not built into ac-sources. I hope some future version of pdc-ultra does make it into the kernel...