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Any success on installing linux on a 8790 with raid 0

post #1 of 20
9/3/04 at 1:44pm
Thread Starter 
I have not had any success so far, for all distro I had tried.
Anyone had a successful story?
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post #2 of 20
9/4/04 at 8:37am
is it a hardware raid? if it is what chipset?
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post #3 of 20
9/5/04 at 2:07am
Thread Starter 
8790 is having Promise fasttrak 100 raid controller
The driver provided on Promise.com won't work.
But if you use Suse, the Yast can detect the raid 0 array. Unfortunately, the DMA mode cannot be activated.
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post #4 of 20
9/5/04 at 6:54am
have you tried hdparm to activate the DMA mode?
If suse can actually detect it does that mean you can also use the raid?
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post #5 of 20
9/5/04 at 3:13pm
Thread Starter 
Yes Suse can detect the raid without the help of driver. So I installed suse without the driver. But I have to keep DMA off. If I use hdparm to switch on DMA, the system will crash in a second.

In fact during the installation I have to use DMA off, otherwise the boot sector cannot even be correctly written.
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post #6 of 20
9/6/04 at 10:02pm
I think its because this suse uses another version of the promise closed source drivers. I think if you use the kernel modules ataraid & pdcraid. Then it should detect your drive as /dev/ataraid and that drive should be able to be enabled with DMA. This is how i would do it with gentoo, should work with suse but no gaurentees
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post #7 of 20
9/7/04 at 12:36am
Thread Starter 
Suse does detect it as /dev/ataraid, but DMA won't work.
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post #8 of 20
9/8/04 at 12:34am
what do your logs say when you try to do hdparm?
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post #9 of 20
9/8/04 at 12:46am
Thread Starter 
I can do hdparm without any problem. I can use hdparm to active the DMA of both drives. But after that the system will crash immediately.
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post #10 of 20
9/9/04 at 2:34am
i mean when ya do it on /dev/ataraid
the dmesg and the /var/log/messages or whever your logs are located. the usually give you some more info as to whats going on behind the scenes. I would do a cat | grep -i hdparm and maybe cat | grep -i /dev/ataraid to see whats going on during boot up and during hdparm use
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post #11 of 20
9/9/04 at 3:53am
Thread Starter 
Now I cannot even install the Suse9.0 on the raid, though I did that just months ago!
Yast can detect the ataraid and I can do my partition. But it failed formating the partitions before copying files. Sigh.
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post #12 of 20
9/9/04 at 4:41am
Damn that really sucks. Automated installers are horrid IMO although they've improved thigns like this make ya wonder how good they really are. I wish i could help out with that more. But im not a specialist with this Yast stuff. Im pretty sure you can get that dma problem working. I googled the chipset for your raid and suse and the results i got were dated 2003 and earlier. As i said b4 i dont know which version of the drivers your using but i think the ones that come with the kernel and not the ones that are propretary promise ones, are the ones that ive herd work with dma. It could be that there is some sort of conflict with the kernel modules, but then again Im not exactly sure how SuSE builds its kernels.
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post #13 of 20
9/9/04 at 9:33am
<shameless plug>Hehe... don't like automated installers? Try gentoo! :-D</shameless plug>
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post #14 of 20
9/9/04 at 4:39pm
Thread Starter 
Jamseshuang, did you install gentoo on your raid 0, dual boot with windows? I mean on the raid0 directly, not the linux software raid.

Gentoo is using 2.6 kernal now and not support ataraid anymore. How did you do that?

I ever tried gentoo with 2.4 kernal but didn't have a success. During the installation you have random crash down. I guess it is because of DMA once again. Gentoo by default switches on the DMA but that causes the raid0 problem.
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post #15 of 20
9/9/04 at 6:06pm
*ahem* kernEl *ahem*
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post #16 of 20
9/11/04 at 6:05pm
the 2.6 kernel supports raid. I dont see why they take device driver support out that usually leave that kinda stuff in and add in more support for stuff as kernel versions progress. If your talking about the gentoo boot CD. I believe they should have support for raid at boot. There are some command line arguements you have to put in before the system boots. It should display a prompt asking you which kernel to boot to and the diffrent options you want to have enabled.
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post #17 of 20
9/12/04 at 12:30am
Thread Starter 
I think 2.6 only supports software raid, not ataraid anymore.
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post #18 of 20
9/21/04 at 5:30pm
Ok here ya go the secret to getting it running is there is a patch for the Promise driver for the kernel. It fixes the DMA issue. I run Gentoo with 2.6.7-r11 on my 8790 fulltime no windows. If you go to the Gentoo forums here
: http://forums.gentoo.org/ and search for promise there is a thread that talks all about it. I have been running this for about 2 months now. The next fix is awaiting ati for the new driver that will correctly identify the gpu ram and agp memory.
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post #19 of 20
9/22/04 at 12:33am
Thread Starter 
But are you using raid 0?
How does gentoo 2.6 support raid 0 on 8790?
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post #20 of 20
9/23/04 at 12:17pm
I'm not using the raid portion at this time, couldn't justify it. It works with raid but you need to make a change to the promise controller module. Once you make that change you should have no issues running.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.p...t=promise+raid

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.p...t=promise+raid

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.p...t=promise+raid

I suggest using kernel 2.6.7 or higher. Also your drives for devices are not a & b they start at e and go up. I really don't suggest raid but if you got to go for it.
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