Installing to unsupported ATA device

[tparker]

I'm trying to install Gentoo onto a system with two HDD's configured as a RAID mirror through the onboard Promise 20736 SATA RAID controller. Thus far, searching through the web, I have managed to find an appropriate source and binary driver package for my card and have thus managed to mount the disk (as /dev/sda) and install gentoo onto the relavent partitions. The problem is with the final stage - configuring grub / lilo.

Initially (to install), since I couldn't compile the driver in the Gentoo CD environment, I force loaded the binary driver. After compiling the new kernel for my gentoo system (2.4.22) and then compiled the source ATA drivers - but I realise now that those drivers would have compiled under the gentoo cd kernel version instead. So QUESTION 1: Is this a problem with initrd? When initrd image is loaded at system boot (for the 2.4.22 kernel) will it automatically force load the wrong version ATA driver?

I created an 'initrd' image with the ata driver enclosed, by typing (still from within the CD install environment) :
mkinitrd --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod --with ft3xx /boot/initrd-2.4.22.img 2.4.22

Yes, those modules do exist. And I copied the ft3xx drivers to /lib/modules/2.4.22/kernel/driver/scsi . mkinitrd runs without errors - though I don't know whether it actually "worked". It did create a file.

Upon booting, despite specifying the initrd image (in lilo), I still get system errors. I tried several of the various options in the default lilo.conf file - like playing with the disk= settings. I get a kernel panic, cannot mount root fs error, then the system stalls. I suspect the ATA driver didn't even load - I don't see any driver output on screen. I do get the following error:

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno = 2

Does this mean anything to anyone?

QUESTION 2: Does anyone know how I should go about getting my system to work? I seem to be in a position where I can't make the correct modules etc... because I can't even boot into the system in order to do this. Chicken and egg problem? Or just something i'm overlooking?

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Linux-Promise-RAID1-HOWTO.html did not help

Thanks!

Terence