At 07:35 PM 10/26/00 -0700, Dan Browning wrote: > - However, it only boots into text mode for some reason (Any >comments, Mike Brancato?). In text mode, is there anyway to configure >a RAID device? I don't see the "Make RAID device" button anywhere. >Maybe someone could spell out the baby steps if it is indeed possible. You seem to have missed what may be your key problem here: The standard Linux kernel version 2.2.16 (and earlier) does not support your Promise HDD controller. You need a specially patched kernel to support it. You cannot access the card unless you have booted with a patched kernel. Now consider the implications: You install Redhat using someone else's boot disk (which contains a patched kernel), you setup your RAID array, you boot the machine from /boot using the stock Redhat kernel, you cannot access half the drives in your array, you cannot boot (RAID-5 only tolerates the loss of 1 disk, not two), you are SOL (unless you'd like to boot from the floppy again). What you really need is your own kernel (and preferably source code for same) which has Hedrick's unified-ide patch installed and thus recognizes your Promise controller. What you should probably do instead is one of the following: 1. Install Redhat, creating your RAID-5 array on your four disks, while they're all on the supported controller, then patch your kernel, make sure you've got it working, edit your raidtab so Linux will look for two of your disks on the Promise controller, power down and physically move the disks, boot up and be happy (I did something like this earlier today with a RH 6.2 box and a patched copy of kernel 2.2.17, using a very simlar Promise ATA100 controller, it seems happy so far). 2. If you're planning on most of your disk usage being under one or two mountpoints, you may want to consider putting your entire root filesystem on one device, then creating a RAID array later (after installing a patched kernel) and just mounting it somewhere else (e.g. /home). If you're feeling more daring, you could install, make a boot floppy, make a root floppy with some basic utils (or, my preference, install another minimal Redhat installation in a 200mb partition on hda), use patched kernels for both, reboot the machine from your "alternate" boot device, cp -av your "main" root filesystem to somewhere (better yet, install it on some other spare IDE drive in the first place), create your RAID array, cp-av your "main" root filesystem onto the RAID array. Make the necessary adjustments (particularly to raidtab, lilo and fstab), boot and be happy :) 3. If you're feeling more cutting-edge, or simply lazy, you could try installing Redhat's Rawhide development distribution, which ships with the preview version of Kernel 2.4 and as such should have built-in support for your Promise card. Probably you could also install the Rawhide kernel 2.4 rpm into a Redhat 7 system to get a similar effect. 4. You could, if you feel like reading some documentation first and have another Linux (or vaguely similar) box handy and access to a cd-burner, build your own Redhat 7 install cd using a copy of kernel 2.2.17 with the unified-ide patch rather than Redhat's standard kernel 2.2.16. Then you could use the cd to do a GUI install with RAID and support for your hdd controller. It should also be possible to do this without actually burning a cd, if you have a local FTP or NFS server you could stick the install files on. This would be especially good if you're not sure you got it right, as you wouldn't have to burn a disc for each mistake. >Also: What if I just installed vanilla non-raid Redhat, then compiled >my own kernel and configured RAID after the thought? Is there a >Disk-Druid alternative for Post-Installation that can do RAID? I don't know about a GUI tool, <flamebait>I tend to use Windows when I want a GUI</flamebait>, but you can certainly use fdisk to create RAID autodetect partitions (type fd), edit your raidtab to define your /dev/md* device(s) and use mkraid to create RAID arrays (and then, to avoid looking as stupid as I did once, remember to use mke2fs to actually create a filesystem on the RAID array before trying to write to it). Note BTW that if you decide to go the Kernel 2.4 route you should read the LVM howto, as LVM is IMHO somewhat of an improvement on classic software RAID, even if it seems demented on the surface. -- Who is this General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk? _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
