It is possible and not very difficult to set up software RAID using two IDE drives and an ATA/100 controller. I recently installed E-smith 4.1 onto two 40GB Maxtor drives, each on it's own ATA/100 controller, using SW RAID, and here are some instructions on how to do the same.
NB: I took a bunch of this from
http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/hardware/udma66.htmlbut modified it to suit the e-smith distro.
Boot up on the esmith CD, typing "accept", etc., and when you finally get to the part where you can start choosing what hard drive option you want, hit "Alt-F2" or "Ctrl-Alt-F2". I forget which one. One of these should bring you to a shell. If you see a "#" in the top of the screen you did it right. Now type in "cat /proc/pci | more" This will show you more than you wanted to know about all the PCI devices in your system.
Look for something like this:
----begin snip from web page listed above---------
Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology Unknown device (rev 1). Vendor id=105a. Device id=4d38.
Medium devsel. IRQ 5. Master Capable. Latency=64.
I/O at 0x1400 [0x1401].
I/O at 0x10f4 [0x10f5].
I/O at 0x10f8 [0x10f9].
I/O at 0x10f0 [0x10f1].
I/O at 0x1080 [0x1081].
Now Note down the values on those lines beginning with I/O, call them a, b, c, d (which in my case are 0x1400, 0x10f4, 0x10f8, 0x10f0). Ignore "e" (0x1080).
Then give the following command line argument to your kernel on the "lilo" prompt.
lilo: linux ide2=a,b+2 ide3=c,d+2
Which in my case is:
lilo: linux ide2=0x1400,0x10f6 ide3=0x10f8,0x10f2
-----end snip--------
What I did was a little different. This guy had only one ATA/100 controller, I had two. So, if I had a,b,c, and d from my first controller, and e,f,g,h from my second controller, I used the following:
lilo: accept ide2=a,b+2 ide3=e,f+2
(a and b are for the primary cable on my first controller card, c and d are for the secondary cable on my first controller card, e and f are for the primary cable on my second controller card, and g and h are for the secondary controller on my second card - hope that makes sense)
Well, after you note down all these bizarre numbers, reboot (Ctrl-Alt-Del).
This time, type in what you learned from above (except, instead of typing "linux ide2=.....", type in "accept ide2=.....", without the quotation marks, and with the hex numbers you figured out above.
This will let the installation find your hard drive. Setting up the raid-1 is easy - you just choose if from the menu when it comes up. But the problem after installation is that every time you boot you have to type this funny sequence of numbers in.
You have to do this the first time - except now, instead of typing "accept ide2=....", hit the
key to find out what you put in place of "accept". That will get your system up and running.
You don't want to have to do that every time you boot up the machine, though. So after you get everything up and running, log in as root with your root password (if all you see is the colorful administration menu, hit "Alt-F2" to get a login prompt, and "Alt-F1" later to get back to the administration menu - and when you are going back to F1, don't forget to first log out by typing "exit").
After you have logged in, type "pico /etc/lilo.conf" to edit the bootup configuration file. Under the entry where it says "image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.16-22" (or similar), you should see four or five settings. Go down below these and add an append line. Here is what my /etc/lilo.conf looks like:
----------begin /etc/lilo.conf-------------
boot=/dev/md0
disk=/dev/md0
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
message=/boot/e-smith.pcx
default=esmith
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.16-22
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.16-22.img
label=esmith
read-only
root=/dev/md1
append="ide2=0xda00,0xd803 ide3=0xd000,0xce03"
--------------end /etc/lilo.conf--------------
Note: the quotation marks are needed in the append line. And make sure you put in for the 0xda00 and such whatever you put in to boot off the CD in the first place - the ones here are just the values for my computer.
After you change the file, hit "Ctrl-O" to save it, then "Ctrl-X" to quit the editor. Now type "lilo" to save the settings to the boot sector of your hard drive. If you've used lilo before, this will look a little funny because you are using RAID - it will write the boot sector to both hard drives (I think that's what it's doing, at least).
Now reboot and pray that it worked.
I got a great deal on my drives - after various mail-in-rebates, I get both 40GB Maxtor drives and both ATA/100 controllers for $200 total. I couldn't pass up the deal, so I got them, and then dug around to figure this stuff out.
If I need to clarify this, I'll be glad to, just let me know.
Tim Larson
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