I just did a cooker install with the Promise FastTrak S150 TX4 in the same machine (A7V600 Asus mb) that is was having trouble with the VIA driver. It was fairly straight forward except for the problem that the a couple of the drives were used with the VIA experiment. It seemed that the installer wanted to use the raid that was created with VIA. To get the installer to proceed I had to clear all the partitions and reboot. The rest went well.
The only "issue" I have currently is that the TX4 bios stops the boot with "no arrays defined" press [ESC] to continue. Then I have to pick which drive to boot from (and yes the mb bios is configured correctly). There does not seem to be a way in the promise bios to disable those messages. Also webmin showed that the reused hard drives had 3 extra blank partitions that all started at 1 and end at 1. Deleting them with webmin seems to have worked. One more thing, I had to use a different network card than the embedded 3com Gigabit LOM (3C940). Asus has a driver on their web site which can be found at: http://www.asus.com/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=A7V600&Type=All&SLa nguage=en-us > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Mark Scott > Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 3:22 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [Cooker] New ISO with updates > > > Gwenole Beauchesne wrote: > > On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Mark Scott wrote: > > > >>Ah, yes, doing a "modprobe sata_via" makes the drive work. So I > guess the > >>kernel doesn't need patching, but maybe updating (the last > libata patch was > >>17th Oct). I don't know if this is reliable or not... I'll find > out over > >>time :-) > > > > AFAICS, this only brings up sata_promise 0.83, which is now in > > 2.4.22-19mdk. > Just checking... you mean the difference between -18mdk and -19mdk is a > newer libata, in which only sata_promise changed? (i.e. no change in > sata_via) > > > I am interested to know the performance of your plain IDE > > drive. Strangely, it does appear that if sata_via is loaded, kernel > > doesn't recognize normal disk as UDMA133 capable... > > > I'm afraid I don't have that problem, the PATA drive isn't UDMA133 > capable, it's a Seagate ST36561A (6.3Gb). It gets a buffered disk read > speed (from hdparm -t) of 9.46MB/sec. The SATA disk achieves 50.67MB/sec. > > I also did the following to create a 512 Mb file: > # time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=1000000 > 1000000+0 records in > 1000000+0 records out > 0.61user 7.10system 0:14.15elapsed 54%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata > 0maxresident)k > 0inputs+0outputs (146major+42minor)pagefaults 0swaps > > No idea how good a metric it is, but writing 512Mb in 14.15s is > 36.18Mb/s (ext3 fs) > > > BTW, ia32 installer won't know about those SATA drivers unless it is > > rebuilt with latest -BOOT kernel & ldetect-lst. > > Uhuh... I was thinking of doing 'urpmi --root ...' to install a basic > bootable system on the SATA disk (and putting sata_via in its initrd), > bypassing the need to work out how to rebuild the installer. Unless > that's more beneficial to everyone... > > -- > Mark > >
