Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> "Howard Chu" <XYZ.hyc@highlandsun.com> wrote in message
> news:ZKudnRDph9UJxo3fRVn-3Q@comcast.com...
>
>>Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>
>>>"Howard Chu" <XYZ.hyc@highlandsun.com> wrote in message
>>>news:f7-dnSdua8tQk43fRVn-2g@comcast.com...
>>>
>>>
>>>>I've been trying to get a new AMD64 system set up and booted, with no
>>>>luck so far. Installing SuSE 9.2 on an Asus A8V. There are 4 SATA drives
>>>>on the system, two on the Promise PDC20378 in RAID0 mode, and two on the
>>>>onboard VIA 6420/8237. I have Windows XP Pro SP1 installed on the PDC,
>>>>and I've formatted the other two SATA drives as Dynamic Disks, so that I
>>>>can setup striping on them in both Windows and Linux.
>>>>
>>>>SATA drive sdc has 3 interesting partitions - 512MB for Linux swap,
>>>>32MB ext2fs for /boot, and 5GB for Linux software raid root.
>>
>>>SuSE is not your friend for weird setups, and Promise is not your friend
>>>for *ANYTHING*.
>>
>>I'm beginning to see that...
>>
>>The lilo that SuSE bundles is 22.3.4. I downloaded the source for 22.6.1
>>on another system and built that, which works a bit better. lilo actually
>>loads off the hard drive now and gives the boot menu. It loads the kernel
>>but setting up the root partition (which is raid0 on /dev/md0) fails. At
>>least it's better than the undocumented 'L 99 99 99...'
>>
>>...
>>
>>OK, I played around some more and used the Rescue boot to tweak the
>>default initrd. Since the kernel wasn't automatically detecting my raid0
>>root partition, I edited the linuxrc in the initrd and stuck an explicit
>>"mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdd2" in there. Finally the system is
>>booting all the way up.
>
>
> Great! And thanks for posting your working solution.
>
> By the way, software RAID is not your friend either. You may have noticed
> that.....
Indeed, this has been the most painful install I've ever done...
There was one more problem, I had installed lilo into the MBR of
/dev/sdc, which seems to have corrupted the Dynamic Disk tag so Windows
wouldn't touch the disks any more. Nothing in the Windows disk utils
would reset the partition tables so I booted back into Linux and used
fdisk to wipe the disk labels and recreate the partition tables. Then
back into Windows again to convert from Basic disk to Dynamic disk...
Fortunately none of these steps damaged the contents of the partitions.
So I changed lilo to use the partition boot sector of my /boot
partition, and now I have to use the Windows boot loader to get Linux
going...
So, the final summary of how it all works:
Set Promise controller in RAID0 mode, install Windows XP with Promise
raid driver on floppy on that "disk." (Linux sees these as /dev/sda and
/dev/sdb, but obviously must not use them. Instead, use dmraid to access
them.)
Use any partitioning tool to set up the other two SATA disks. I
partitioned them in Basic Disk mode, then converted to Dynamic Disk
(LDM), and then ran diskpart to "retain" the old-style partitions. I'm
not sure this was necessary, since Linux 2.6 does support LDM, I just
did it anyway.
/dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1 = 512MB swap spaces
/dev/sdc2 = 32MB ext2 /boot
/dev/sdc3, /dev/sdd2 = 5GB parts for striped /dev/md0 mounted as root
lilo 22.6.1 installed in /dev/sdc2 boot sector.
copied the boot sector to a Windows file linux.bin so I could reference
it from the Windows bootloader (add 'C:\linux.bin="Linux"' to the end of
C:\boot.ini)
In /etc/lilo.conf I had to explicitly assign
disk=/dev/sdc
bios=0x81
Otherwise it's looking at the wrong disk at boot time. (Linux sees
/dev/sda and /dev/sdb as separate devices, assumes they are BIOS 0x80
and 0x81, so sdc would be 0x82. But BIOS sees only /dev/sda due to the
RAID setup, so /dev/sdc is 0x81.)
After that I carved up the rest of the space on sdc and sdd into a
striped reiser partition under Linux and a striped NTFS partition for
Windows, and finally it's setup the way I wanted.
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support