7vrxp promise 20276 raid

Hello. I'm having trouble getting a hard drive detected. I installed mandrake the other day and went through the learning curve of changing from windows to linux. I'm still trying to get to my feet in respect to handling it.

I've got a gigabyte 7vrxp rev2.0 board with the promise 20276 raid/ide controller. I set it to normal ata in bios, come into mandrake 9.1 and go into harddrake. It shows it up in other devices, as just 20276 and i cant do anything more with it.
How am i ment to access the other hard drive.

Thanks in advance,
Brad

Its probably loaded, try the command:

dmesg | grep 202

And if the kernel saw the controller, it should output something like this:

fin@orwell:/home$ dmesg | grep 202
PDC20267: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 68
PDC20267: chipset revision 2
PDC20267: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20267: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.

Cheers,

Finegan

[brad@thor brad]$ dmesg | grep 202
PDC20276: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:0f.0
PDC20276: chipset revision 1
PDC20276: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20276: neither IDE port enabled (BIOS)

It says that, makes me think theres something in the bios i have to change, but i 've looked through, and nothing obvious stands out, it shouldnt Have to, because in windows it picks it up straight away, which makes me think its a driver problem or maybe something with the kernel.

Would you mind explaining that command? I usualy remember things better if i know how they work.

Thanks
Brad

Nah, the Promise series doesn't load the BIOS for the card unless there's something hooked up to the card itself. Although there is sometimes an option in the machine BIOS to load the Promise BIOS, it gets kinda silly.

The command, no problem!

"dmesg" is the kernel ring buffer which is a meaningless way of saying its a record of the kernel loading support for everything in order as it loaded, the first thing is the RAM, then the chip, then the PCI bus, etc... Its the first stop for hardware issues. "dmesg" is also only a few hundred lines long so if you get something that spams dmesg with a lot of errors or just debugging info, the top gets pushed out. No matter, all of the same info is logged permanently to /var/log/messages also, for your perusing pleasure.

The pipe: "|" is used to take the output of one command and send it to the next, in the above case, grep.

grep is "get regular expression", the quintensential scripting program from the damn of unix time. It has about two dozen options or so. The argument to it of "202" was what I was telling it to return in its search, any line with "202" in it. Check the man page on grep, its the swiss army knif of search tools.

Also, to get a good look at dmesg: dmesg | less (that'll give it to you a page at a time instead of in one big wham.

I'm never a big fan of using books to learn things, but there's one that rocks and by the time your halfway through it you're ahead of it. That's how good of a book it is: "Running Linux" Matt Welsch.

Cheers,

Finegan

All well and good, thanks for the command info, but where does that leave me in respect to me being able to access the hard drive i've attached. It detects it when it scans through the raid/ide during bootup (bios) but i'm still lost as to what I'm meant to do now. The raid/ide controller is onboard.
But thanks for the nice explanation, i might check out that book if i get the chance.

Feeling lost,
Brad

PS it detects the hard drive thats connected when it runs through its Detecting Devices, or something. (in the promise detecting part)

Once the card is enabled in BIOS it should do a normal IDE device scan on it and list the current partitions in dmesg, it'll look something like this:

PDC20265: chipset revision 2
PDC20265: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20265: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.
    ide4: BM-DMA at 0x6800-0x6807, BIOS settings: hdi:DMA, hdj:DMA
    ide5: BM-DMA at 0x6808-0x680f, BIOS settings: hdk:DMA, hdl:pio
hdb: HITACHI CDR-8130, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hde: Maxtor 4W080H6, ATA DISK drive
hdg: Maxtor 4R080L3, ATA DISK drive
hdi: Maxtor 98196H8, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide2 at 0x9800-0x9807,0x9402 on irq 9
ide3 at 0x9000-0x9007,0x8802 on irq 9
ide4 at 0x8000-0x8007,0x7802 on irq 10
blk: queue c03f458c, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
hde: 160086528 sectors (81964 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=158816/16/63, UDMA(100)
blk: queue c03f48d0, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
hdg: 160086528 sectors (81964 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=9964/255/63, UDMA(100)
blk: queue c03f4c14, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
hdi: 160086528 sectors (81964 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=158816/16/63, UDMA(100)
hdb: ATAPI 16X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, DMA
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
Partition check:
 hde: hde1 hde2
 hdg: hdg1 hdg2
 hdi: hdi1 hdi2

Your extra drives should show up on IDE2 and IDE3 and then get the drive letters: /dev/hde, hdf, hdg, hdh

The partition check at the end should show you what's mountable or not, so for instance say you have a big horking ntfs partition on /dev/hde1, mount it with:

mount -t ntfs /dev/hde1 /mnt/windows

Of course, that's after making the mount point /mnt/windows with:

mkdir /mnt/windows

Cheers,

Finegan

Yes, but it Doesnt detect it. When the second ata controller (raid/ata) goes through detecting devices, it finds the hard drive, and says Master ide enabled, or something to that effect, saying its enabled it. Then in mandrake it still says that the ata/raid isnt started/enabled.

Brad

I'm using Slackware 10.1 (Linux kernel 2.4.29) on an MSI 845E Max 2 board with an onboard Promise FastTrak RAID controller also based on the PDC20276, and I have the same:

PDC20276: neither IDE port enabled (BIOS)

problem. Has anyone found a way around this problem already?


The readme on the linux driver download for the FastTrak TX2000 (which I believe is also PDC20276 based) from the Promise site mentions a probable fix:

Linux Kernels 2.4.x misidentify Promise ATA-RAID controllers as simple
IDE controllers. This results in the built-in Linux IDE driver trying to
handle the controller, which can prevent the proper FastTrak ATA RAID driver
being loaded. This status is referred to as "IDE issue".

If you are using Linux kernel 2.4.x, follow installation instructions 
a.) through c.).

NOTE: All IDE channels except the first and second one are disabled for the
"IDE issue". It can be enable by removing 'ide2=0 ide3=0 ide4=0 ide5=0
ide6=0 ide7=0 ide8=0 ide9=0' in /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst.

a.) "linux ide0=0x1f0,0x3f6,14 ide1=0x170,0x376,15 ide2=0 ide3=0 ide4=0
      ide5=0 ide6=0 ide7=0 ide8=0 ide9=0"

b.) If using lilo:
	/etc/lilo.conf
       	image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20
		label=linux-2.4.20
		append="ide0=0x1f0,0x3f6,14 ide1=0x170,0x376,15 ide2=0 ide3=0
		ide4=0 ide5=0 ide6=0 ide7=0 ide8=0 ide9=0"
		initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.20.img
		root=/dev/sda1
		read-only

   c.) If using grub: 
	/boot/grub/menu.lst
       	title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20)
       	root (hd0,0)
       	kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20 ro root=/dev/sda1 ide0=0x1f0,0x3f6,14
	ide1=0x170,0x376,15 ide2=0 ide3=0 ide4=0 ide5=0 ide6=0 ide7=0 ide8=0 ide9=0
       	initrd /initrd-2.2.20.img

Found the answer for kernel 2.4.29 (Slackware 10.1):

Kernel configuration should be:

CONFIG_PDC202XX_FORCE=y

Has anyone tried the process listed on the following website:

http://www.magic-lamp.org/howto/pdc2...drake8.2.phtml

Getting the IDE-RAID working can be pretty hairy. I have this same controller and I plan to try this process tonight when I get home from the office.