I had the txtsetup.oem stuff all sussed out for the dos-based boot disk (which I first did about a year ago). Since then, I moved to the linux-based unattended setup.
As we only have about 3 machines with this controller, I'd not had to reinstall any of them in the time since migrating to the linux-based installer.
Alas, I recently *did* need to reinstall some, and there seem to be some gotchas. Luckily, I found a workaround.
Initially, I would do an unattended install, just like I normally would, and select the proper mass storage controller from the menu.
But, when I would try to boot the system after the initial setup, I would get:
Invalid BOOT.INI file Boot from C:\winnt\ NTDETECT failed
A subsequent reboot would cause the system to start, but then die when it tried to go to native mass storage drivers (instead of using BIOS). These symptoms are much like what one would see if the mass storage driver setup was screwy, which threw me for a while.
Turns out, though, that the linux driver for the FastTrak doesn't actually use the "RAID" features at all. It just sees "sda, sdb, sdc" (or however many disks you have, presumably).
So all of Unattended's setup work was happening only on /dev/sda1, and not on the "mirror". I think this then caused Windows to freak out when it tried to go to the native RAID drivers, and the data on the two disks was different.
I had started with a mirrored array of two disks. What I did was unplug all but one of the disks (breaking the array), and install via unattended onto that disk. The initial and subsequent few reboots all went well (did the conversion to ntfs, did the initial install, etc.).
At this point, I put all the disks back in, and rebuilt (repaired) the mirror (copying the data from the single disk I started with to the second disk).
Everything continued to work, ActivePerl installed itself, defrag commenced, etc.
So, I figured I'd send this mail to the list, in case anybody had been using one of these controllers with a mirroring setup, and wanted to be able to use unattended to install them.
It's kind of a kludge, and I think it'd only work for mirroring setups, but it's better than nothing. :)
Jordan
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