In case anyone's interested, I finally got my Dual Pentium III with RAID 1 going.
Call me a wimp, but I abandoned the Debian release in favor of Red Hat. 2 Reasons: 1.) I am more familiar with Red Hat's file layouts and configuration tools, and; 2.) Promise supports Red Hat with PDC20265 drivers in both UP and SMP flavors. I had a copy of RH6.2 laying around, so i fired it up. I was still having my lockup problems. I thought I had solved them with the BIOS upgrade but that was not the case. In the process of troubleshooting I removed one processor. Finally I made it through a complete install. I was beginning to think my second processor was bad (or the socket was.) But under one processor it was working. For anyone else who wants to play with Promise's RAID controller under Linux, here is a brief synopsis: First you build the array using the BIOS extensions. For those of you who don't recall, this was a motherboard-integrated RAID solution (MSI-6321 with integrated Promise PDC20265.) You do the install in "expert" mode, which prompts you for a driver disk for the FASTRACK RAID controller drivers. They install as an sd device (big surprise.) The install proceeds pretty much as expected. The system appears to Linux to have only an "sda" device, even though it has two drives. Fortunately I made a boot disk, because the system wouldn't boot afterwards. I don't know if it was because of the "funny" RAID superblocks, or if it was because my boot partition was bigger than 1023 cylinders, but I downloaded the newest version of LILO and that fixed that problem. Probably the 1023 cylinder thing, huh? Next was the ultimate test. I removed the Primary Master drive from the machine, the one that would have been "sda" if the RAID wasn't working ;o) and powered it up. Lo and behold, it booted! I really DID have two copies of the OS! After rebuilding the array, it was time to get the SMP working. Red Hat install didn't make an initrd image for the SMP kernel, since there was only one processor in the machine at install time. It DID, however, place the kernel and associated system map in my /boot directory....strange. Anyway, I made the image, and booted the SMP kernel. It ran for a while, and then locked up again. Video frozen, not even mouse pointer movement. Since I had previously gotten telnet working, I tried to log in. Nothing. So I started doing some research. I read that you shouldn't run ACPI with SMP, so I disabled that, and started poking around the BIOS for other potential problems. Then it occurred to me: I had a older Viper 330 Video card in the thing, since I was basically building this machine out of spare parts. I was pretty sure the Viper didn't support AGP 4x, so I turned it off. Well, I guess that was the problem, because the machine has been solid for 4 days now. Strange that under one processor it would work, and with two it wouldn't. Can anyone explain this? To sum up, how do I like having a 2GHz machine with 60 gigs of mirrored RAID and 384 megs of RAM, after struggling along on a P166? SWEET! I bet even Netscape 6 will run fast now! Rich Cloutier President, C*O SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES www.sysupport.com ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
