Topic: Highpoint RocketRaid 404

[Laurence Griffiths]

Has anybody had any luck yet in installing SME 5.6 onto a drive / drives attached to one of these cards?

In searching these forums, I have noticed that quite a few attempts have been made, but then silence........ What has happened?

[AV]

Hi,

I will try this in sunday and will post results.

AV

[Laurence Griffiths]

Great! Thanks for that.

I have emailed support@highpoint-tech.com and have asked them for advice, but have received no answer yet. If I receive an answer and manage to get it to work, I'll also post it back here.

[Charlie Brady]

Laurence Griffiths wrote:

> I have emailed support@highpoint-tech.com and have asked them
> for advice, but have received no answer yet. If I receive an
> answer and manage to get it to work, I'll also post it back
> here.

You haven't asked for my advice, but I'll give it nonetheless. Use currently supported hardware. And use linux software raid, unless you need and intend to use a hot swappable system. The software raid is as fast and reliable as so-called hardware raid, and is more portable. And you won't get grey hair trying to make it work.

This HOWTO might help you to decide:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/ATA-RAID-HOWTO/disable.html

[The "append" line mentioned may not be required. I have a system working with software RAID on a motherboard with Promise chipset. I installed software raid using /dev/hda and /dev/hde, then just moved the two drives onto the RAID connectors on the motherboard (/dev/hde and /dev/hdg). Nothing else was required. YMMV.]

Regards

Charlie

[Laurence Griffiths]

Thanks for that Charlie. I'll have a look at that link.

But I have quite a few reasons for wanting to use the RocketRAID 404 card. And the few hairs that I still have on my head are rapidly turning grey anyway.

Firstly, I actually have the  RocketRAID card in my hand right now. - It came from one of our BEEG servers that had its drives and RAID cards upgraded. So I have the RocketRAID card to play with.

Secondly, the machine that I intend using as an SME server is an old Pentium II machine whose ROM BIOS doesn't want to have anything to do with the 2 spare 120GB IDE drives that I have lying around. If I attach these drives to the RocketRAID card, I can install and run Mandrake 9.1 out of the box and RedHat 8 with a bit of tweaking. So I know that this is one way around the ROM BIOS problem.

Thirdly, I can use the RocketRAID card for quite a variety of RAID options. Your software RAID is RAID 1 mirroring. On the RocketRAID card, I can use RAID 0 (Striping), RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 10 (combination of mirroring and striping) and RAID 5 (combination of parity data and striping).

[Rich]

I tried to get the Highpoint RocketRaid 133 running a while back.  You have to create a boot disk with the drivers on it. If someone had already made one, they should be able to email it to you.

If not then i think you will also need the ide and raid how to's.

I got it working for a while but then upgraded versions soon after and i never bothered to work out how to do it again.

Good luck,  
Rich

[AV]

Charlie Brady wrote:
> You haven't asked for my advice, but I'll give it
> nonetheless. Use currently supported hardware.

Promise RAID FastTrack SX4000. There is support for that card in RH 7.3. So I suppose that this is supported hardware??? But no go in SME 5.6...

> And use linux
> software raid, unless you need and intend to use a hot
> swappable system.

In my "Promise" case Hot Spare system.

> The software raid is as fast and reliable
> as so-called hardware raid, and is more portable.

OK! If I cannot manage Promise to work I will try do software mirror.

> And you
> won't get grey hair trying to make it work.



>
> Regards
>
> Charlie

Thanks.

AV