# Serial ATA RAID 0 problems

## cerveza2004

ive got 2 segate serial ata drives in a hardware raid 0 configuration on a silicon image 3112 raid controller and i cant seem to get it to show up as a single 240gb drive instead of (2) 120gb drives.  ive tried several different kernels and the closest i can get is for both of the drives to show up without the raid.  i tried using the mandrake 9.1 boot cd and some MAKEDEV script as was instructed in another post and it actually came up as a single raid drive as it was supposed to.

ive tried the mm and development sources, gs sources, compiled in and as modules.

i just tried 2.4.21_rc6-gss with it compiled in and the silicon image driver dmesg output was "No raid array found"

has anyone out there been sucessful in getting a serial ata raid array to come up? i dont care if its only in PIO mode or something like that because i jsut cannot get this thing to come up as one drive as it did with the mandrake boot disc.

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## taskara

hmm.. I wasn't sure that the silicon image driver was a raid driver, thought it was just an ata driver.

anyway, even if it doesn't see your raid array, you will see two hdd's (as you mentioned), which you can then use Linux software raid to setup raid 0.

even tho you may have created a raid 0 array with the serial raid controller, it will ONLY work if you load a raid driver - because it is not a full hardware controller. which leaves you free to use lsr  :Very Happy: 

so you should be fine to use the two hdd's and make a lsr array, which will give you better performance than the controller's "hardware" raid anyway  :Wink: 

if you really want to use the raid driver for silicon image, have you tried 2.5.70 ?

u may have to insert some modules.. with promise chips is its insmod pdcraid maybe there is something similar for silicon image.. don't know.. never tried.. good luck!

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## cerveza2004

ive actually got another parallel ata drive in my system for gentoo, but id like to access my windows files which is what is installed on the raid array already.  i guess ill just make a fat partition on the parallel ata drive to transfer between the 

two OSes; it wont be as easy to get files but i guess it will have to work until a raid driver comes out.

i have tried 2.5.70 sources (mm and development-sources) and i still can only get them to come up in ata mode.  i think they show up as /dev/disc1/ and /dev/disc2/ with disc0 being the parallel ata one.

does anyone know exactally what kernel is used on the mandrake install cd, because i think it was working on that.  also how do you determine what kernel version is running (i found how to get "2.4" but not somthing like 2.4.21.....).

EDIT:

ok i just tried the SMP kernel from the gentoo live cd and i think it works with raid, but i had to add the "doataraid" option for booting:

without "doataraid":

parallel drive and serial drives come up under /dev/drives as discs 0-2

NO raid--shows as 2 single drives

with "doataraid":

same as above but an added "disc3" that is a 240gb drive that i can see my NTFS partition on

so how do i get i kernel working like that on an installed system?

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## taskara

ahhhh ic.. you already have windows installed on the silicon raid array... 

hmmm... did you include all the raid options in the kernel? there are a couple.

you could always copy the mandrake kernel from the cd and boot to it...

you could try redhat-sources

have you tried compiling your kernel with smp?

try disabling acpi and or apm

the fact that it boots and said "no array found" suggests that the raid component of the silicon driver is installed correctly.. something else may be stopping it..

good luck, let us know how you go!

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## cyrillic

I use ac-sources for all my ataraid machines (supports Promise, Highpoint, and SiliconImage)

```
ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support  --->

IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices  --->

<*>     Silicon Image chipset support

<*> Support for IDE Raid controllers (EXPERIMENTAL)

<*>    Silicon Image Medley software RAID (EXPERIMENTAL) 
```

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## cerveza2004

latest results:

gs-sources 2.4.21_rc6

smp support

removed apm and acpi

ataraid and silraid compiled in as modules

still getting "no array found" output in dmesg

gonna try ac-sources next as suggested...

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## cerveza2004

IT WORKS!!!

cyrillic's options with the ac kernel worked like a charm and it came up just as it did on the livecd.  im listening to an mp3 from the ntfs partition right now so it looks like all is good...(i guess alsa is built in to the kernel and it works too)

so should i be able to apply the ac patches to other kernels? is the ac kernel vanilla only with http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/ patches applied?

i wanted to try a 2.5 kernel but i dont see a 2.5.70 patch there yet so maybe ill just use 2.5.69.

ok well im gonna get back to finishing this system build now...

thanks for all the help guys!

edit:

one more thing: were you able to enable dma on your drives? what hdparm commands do you use?

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## cyrillic

 *cerveza2004 wrote:*   

> one more thing: were you able to enable dma on your drives? what hdparm commands do you use?

 

I don't need any hdparm commands when I enable this in the kernel :

```
ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support  --->

IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices  --->

[*]       Use PCI DMA by default when available 
```

BTW, this only works if you have support for your IDE chipset compiled-in also.

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## taskara

even if not, then try running the following from console, and later adding it to /etc/conf.d/local.start if it works for you

hdparm -c1 -d1 -m16 -X69 -k1 /dev/hdx where hdx is your drive (presumedly hde)

you'll have to check, but -X69 = ata100

seeing as serial is ata150, you can prob set to ata133, which I think is -X70

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## Freimauer

I'm having a little problem understanding the above posts. I have an Sil Serial ATA Raid controller built into my MB, but I can't get any of the livecds to recogize it.

I read that the AC kernels work, but how am I supposed to install an AC kernel if I can't mount the drive in the first place? Do you bootstrap from some other Linux distro? I tried messing around with bootsrapping from Knoppix, but Knoppix doesn't really suppor the Sil either.

Any advice would be very appriciated.

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## jacoxnet

I'm afraid you're not going to be able to install gentoo from the LiveCD if you intend to install it to the Silicon Image 3112.  The kernel they use doesn't have support for that controller.  I notice that Suse and apparently Mandrake have support for that controller built in to their default kernels.  You could install one of those distributions and then install gentoo from inside it (using the ac-sources).  I believe I have seen instructions on doing that here in the forums.  I have done that using RedHat -- it isn't too hard to do if you have a little bit of understanding of what is going on in the gentoo install.

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## mickwd

Just to confirm that it is possible to install Gentoo from inside Mandrake 9.1 on an SiI 3112 machine. I did so, and it worked a treat. I also keep Mandrake on the machine as a dual-boot, partly because I like it, and partly because it can be a useful source of information for things like /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.

I'm not using RAID, though - just single SATA.

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## taskara

RAID is the problem.

the gentoo boot cd works fine with a single disk, or even two drives NOT in a raid array.

but it doesn't work when using the silicon image raid option.

so I used two hard disk drives as normal disks, and uses linux software raid. I think the performance is better than using the silicon "hardware" anyway.

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## Freimauer

Well I'll try bootstrapping from Mandrake or Redhat 9.0, shouldn't be that tough. Linux software RAID isn't an option because I already have a raidset set up and Windows 2000 running on the RAID.  Thanks for all the help!

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