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of using the FastTrak driver. So if you have one array, it appears as /dev/sda. A second array would appear as /dev/sdb, and so on. Detection order is important here. If you have another SCSI controller connected to the system, and it's in a lower- numbered PCI slot, disks connected to that controller could show up as /dev/sda and shift the lettering of your Promise arrays. Pay careful attention to the size of each disk, so that you are sure to define partitions on the proper disk. Depending on the partitioning method you use, the driver associated with individual disks might also be displayed, clarifying where disks are connected. Arrays defined on Promise controllers should be explicitly marked. For example: sda: Promise 2+0 Stripe/RAID01.109804 - 38178 MB.

* * *

Warning

The individual disks in your arrays will also show up as standalone ATA disks when using GUI partitioning tools such as Disk Druid. It's very important to create system partitions for installation on the virtual SCSI devices for the array (usually /dev/sda). Never create partitions on the component disks.

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When the time comes to configure your boot loader, be certain to choose LILO. Do not use GRUB with Promise RAID controllers. It's also important to make sure that the master boot record is installed in the proper location: onto the array, not an individual disk. Despite installing Linux onto the proper array partitions, some installation programs still botch the boot loader configuration.

If you're working with a distribution other than Red Hat, download the appropriate zip files to create driver disks for your distribution. I strongly recommend creating a boot disk during the installation process, even if it's a step you normally skip. When the installation is finished, restart the system and use the boot disk you created if you encounter problems. Once the system is online, examine the system logs and system partitions to make certain that you are using the FastTrak driver and that software was installed onto the proper devices, as shown here:

# grep FastTrak /var/log/messages

Jul 28 17:35:29 bored kernel:PROMISE FastTrak Series Linux Driver Version 1.02.0.22

Jul 28 17:35:29 bored kernel: scsi0 : FastTrak

# df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda2 2.4G 1.7G 696M 71% /

/dev/sda1 197M 9.4M 177M 5% /boot

These system logs indicate that the FastTrak driver is bound to the first SCSI channel (scsi0), and the output of df -h shows that the partitions are located on /dev/sda. If the output of df -h reported partitions on an ATA device (/dev/hda, for example), or if the Promise initialization messages did not appear in the system logs, something went wrong during the installation and Linux was installed to a standalone ATA disk instead of the array.

Configuring the ataraid Driver

After your system is up and running with the FastTrak driver, I recommend converting to the ataraid driver for increased stability and performance. If you are only adding a Promise controller to an existing system, start with the steps in this section.

Native support for Promise RAID controllers is located in the ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL Support section of the Linux kernel configuration. First enable Development Support because the ataraid driver is still experimental. Then enable the following features:

<*> ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support

IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices --->

<*> Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy support

...

<*> Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support

...

[*] Generic PCI IDE chipset support

...

[*] PROMISE PDC202{46|62|65|67|68} support

[*] Special UDMA Feature

[*] Special FastTrak Feature

...

<*> Support for IDE Raid controllers

<*> Support Promise software RAID (Fasttrak(tm))

Once you have enabled support for the preceding options, execute make and copy the new kernel into your /boot directory:

# make dep && make bzImage

# make modules && make modules_install

# cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage.ataraid

Reconfiguring LILO

Versions of LILO earlier than 22 do not recognize ataraid devices. So you