Topic: Problems loading drivers at startup

[gatox]

Good evening,

Trying to install smeserver6.0.1-01-20040316 with a Promise SX4000Lite RAID IDE card.

SME doesn't allow me to laod drivers from anywhere.

Even if I press on "Shift" on boot or "Ctrl-X" it doesn't even ask where the drivers are.  This should be fixed in future versions of this wonderful distro.

Alt-F1 = No Drives found, no valid devices have been found to create a valid filesystem.

Alt-F2 = lspci -v :
00:0A.0  RAID Bus Controller: Promise Technologies Inc, unknown device 6621 (rev 01)
Subsystem: Promise Technologies Inc, unknown device 6621
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 96, IRQ 10
.
.
.

As you can see, SME sees the RAID controller but can load the device drivers.  Can anyone fix Anaconda so it will work ?

I would hate to switch to Mickeysoft so I can use my 4x 200GB IDE drives.  

Regards,

[ldkeen]

Gatox, I'll have a look at this over the weekend.

[ldkeen]

Gatox,
I've put a couple of floppy images up on my website. One is a driver disk and the other is a boot disk. I think the preferred method would be to load the driver disk at install time. Haven't tried it but I think you hold the left shift key down as it's booting from the cd-rom you'll be presented with a boot prompt and just type accept dd. Let me know how you go.
Regards Lloyd
http://www.comnetel.com/promise/

[nemtex]

idkeen,

First of all I would like to point out my Linux skills, apart from being able to pronounce it properly, are pretty much non existent. Well I can just about operate ‘MC’ as ‘VI’ just confuses the hell out of me.

I have a Promise sx4000 and I have been having the same problems as Gatox.

I have tried to install the driver prepared by idkeen but they do not load. I have installed SME on a standard IDE drive and installed the drivers, worked fine this way.

I then tried something that I used to do with windows systems, Ghost the partitions onto the RAID. I was pretty hopeful because of successes before.

Copied across fine, although it did take much longer than I had expected, still copied across no probs.

When it came to booting up, I got the SME/LILO splash screen. and it started to boot..... for a second or two.

From reading other posts on Contribs, I believe this to be a problem with the boot order. How can I change this on the standard drive so that the order is correct when transferred onto the RAID….. or am I wasting my time because ghosting drives in this situation just will not work with SME?

I have read posts about putting the fasttrak drivers into the initrd, whatever that is and something about PCITABLE and MODINFO?????

The reason I ask is Gatox seems to be having the same problem as me, I seem to have tried something no one else in this situation has (using Ghost) and idkeen has created a driver disk that actually works making you (idkeen) the most logical choice to ask for help.

If you could point me in the right direction or give me a rough idea what to do, I can give it a go (books, websites etc). Unfortunately at this point it looks like I may have to turn to Windows, a shame really because I’ve been using SME since v4 and never had a problem with it before.

Thanks for any help available


James