Topic: Promise IDE RAID card FastTrack SX4000

[AV]

God day,

I have this card and 3 identical 60GB HDD. I have looked in www.promise.com site and have found drivers for RedHat 7.2 and 7.3 (have to use this for SME 5.6 - do I?). How can I use (install) them in SME 5.6 (how and when I have to put supplied drivers?)? I am going to do fresh install and will try to setup RAID 1 with Hot Spare HDD.
Promise README contains:

2.3 To install the FastTrak SX4000 Linux Driver into an NEW SYSTEM:

1) Start the RedHat Linux Installation with CD ROM booting.

2) At the "Welcome to Red Hat Linux ..." installation screen, a prompt
labeled "boot:" will appear at the bottom of the screen.

3) Type "expert" (without quotations) or "linux dd" at the "boot:" prompt,
then press Enter.

4) At the "Devices" dialog box, insert the driver installation diskette
into the floppy drive. Then select "OK" or "Yes".

In SME 5.6 I get screen with:
"No hard drives have been found. You probably need to manually chose device drivers for the installation to suceed. Would you like to select drivers now?"

After selecting Yes I get anaconda running and then go Language Selection screen, but not driver load screen as it go in RedHat...

What I have to do to get this card working?

Thank you.

AV

[Ashley Shaw]

Hi there

I have encountered a similar problem recently with that  controller card. It was under debian, but the problem was due to the fact that the motherboard chipset (VIA not intel) was not compatible and caused an IRQ conflict when the disks were attached. This prevented the install of anything on the drives.

Please contact me if you need any further assistance and I can see what I can do!    

Ashley

[AV]

Ashley Shaw wrote:
>
> Hi there
>
> I have encountered a similar problem recently with that
> controller card. It was under debian, but the problem was due
> to the fact that the motherboard chipset (VIA not intel) was
> not compatible and caused an IRQ conflict when the disks were
> attached. This prevented the install of anything on the drives.

Hmm... my test system:
M/B Intel D845GEBV2
CPU P4 2.0GHz
RAM 512MB DDR SDRAM
Matrox G550 AGP

It seems that everything is OK. Usualy I use this system for testing new distributions.  Originaly I will put my Promise RAID controller in an old HP Netserver E60. But for now I would like to test everything at home on my test machine.
>
> Please contact me if you need any further assistance and I
> can see what I can do!    

So at the moment I have sticked and any help would be grateful!!!

AV

PS: if there is need for some files or so - please let me know.

[Ashley Shaw]

All of the hardware that you have mentioned seems in order. What  happens from the begining when the machine starts, are you able to access the raid bios and in so what then......

Cheers
Ashley

[AV]

Ashley Shaw wrote:
>
> All of the hardware that you have mentioned seems in order.
> What  happens from the begining when the machine starts, are
> you able to access the raid bios and in so what then......

I get Windows 2000 Pro SP3 boot CD. And I get error in Windows setup:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

I think that this error has something with IRQ conflict... What should I do in this case? I can manualy set IRQ for every PCI slot. Do I have to set manualy IRQ for this card? To what number?

AV

[AV]

AV wrote:
>
> Ashley Shaw wrote:
> >
> > All of the hardware that you have mentioned seems in order.
> > What  happens from the begining when the machine starts, are
> > you able to access the raid bios and in so what then......
>
> I get Windows 2000 Pro SP3 boot CD. And I get error in
> Windows setup:
>
> IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
>
> I think that this error has something with IRQ conflict...

I have looked in internet about that and this is not an IRQ error. This is about memory. So first what I did I changed memory in RAID card. And now Windows setup starts OK. I will install Windows to see is there any other errors. And then I will try to setup SME 5.6. I will post about it later.

AV

[AV]

AV wrote:
>
> AV wrote:
> >
> > Ashley Shaw wrote:
> > >
> > > All of the hardware that you have mentioned seems in order.
> > > What  happens from the begining when the machine starts,
> are
> > > you able to access the raid bios and in so what then......
> >
> > I get Windows 2000 Pro SP3 boot CD. And I get error in
> > Windows setup:
> >
> > IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
> >
> > I think that this error has something with IRQ conflict...
>
> I have looked in internet about that and this is not an IRQ
> error. This is about memory. So first what I did I changed
> memory in RAID card. And now Windows setup starts OK. I will
> install Windows to see is there any other errors. And then I
> will try to setup SME 5.6. I will post about it later.

I have tried but still no go.... How can I load RH 7.3 drivers??? I cannot even this??? Well I will try to download RH 7.3 ISO's and give it a try.

AV

[AV]

> I have tried but still no go.... How can I load RH 7.3
> drivers??? I cannot even this??? Well I will try to download
> RH 7.3 ISO's and give it a try.

I did this and RH 7.3 are nicely working on my system. So I thin that something wrong is with SME...
I will try to download ISO CD again - maybe this is a problem...

AV