RAID drivers for Asus A7V33 and Mandrake 9.1

[Moebius]

I have the Asus A7V333 motherboard with a raid 0 set up with Windows xp. I used partition magic to clean some space before my windows partition where I plan to install mandrake 9.1. I'm trying to install it now and it's asking me which disk/scsi driver to try. none of these make any sence to me, they all seem to be abbreviations. According to the Asus website, this board has the Promise 20276 ATA133 which also seems to be known as the FastTrack133 Lite? I can't find anything like this in the list. I was told I could get the drivers for that at www.promise.com, but I'm so confused about what the thing is actually called because it seems to have so many different names, and I can't really find anything that matches on the promise website. Does anyone know more about where I can find the drivers?

Then once i get ahold of the drivers, how do I use them in the install of Mandrake?

I'm pretty new at this.

Thanks a lot.

[Dolda2000]

I think those HW RAID enabled motherboards make the RAID chips emulate an IDE interface. I'm not sure, but I think that's the case. If that is so, you shouldn't have to select a driver at all.
I haven't used or installed Mandrake, but can you describe what happens? Does it give you any message or something?

[Moebius]

thanks for the reply. Yeah it asks which RAID/SCSI diver to try and gives me a list. They are in abbriviated format, so its hard to determin which one to use. In another forum a guy with my motherboard mentioned pdc20276 or something like that, I can't remember. That one isn't in the list. When installing windows xp, it prompts me to press F6 if I want to install a RAID/SCSI controller and then i put in the floppy with the drivers in it (which I got from the asus website. They don't have linux verions). I suspect it will be the same with Mandrake, but i need to figure out what drivers I need and then find the "Have Disk" button like you would in XP. Or maybe there some special switch I have to use before launching the install. I don't know and I couldn't find anything about how to install a driver manually before install in the Mandrake docs.

Thanks,
Moebius

[Moebius]

I get the impression that most RAID controllers already have the drivers there and Mandrake automatically detects and installs them, but mine aren't in the list or i don't know the proper name.

[Dolda2000]

The thing is that before Linux version 2.4.21, IDE controllers couldn't be compiled as modules, and I believe that Mandrake uses 2.4.20. In that case it is strange that they haven't compiled support for it into the kernel, though.
Are you sure that you have to select a driver? Can't you just proceed without loading extra drivers?
Check if you can find pdcraid otherwise. Or if even that doesn't work, can you check the exact name of the RAID chipset that your motherboard uses?

[Moebius]

OK I just tried it agian. Yeah, there is no way to skip the detection process. It actually detected my hard disks though and saw they they were on the raid controller and even displayed the name of the raid controller when it was booting into the install process. I choose the language, accept the agreement and it displays "Which disk/scsi driver should i try?". The only options are back and next. I select pdcraid and hit next. It said "Found pdcraid disk/scsi interfaces. Do you have another one?" <Yes> <No> <See hardware info> It will say it found x disk/scsi interfaces no matter which driver I try. Its the only disk/scsi controller in there so I select no and hit next. It says please wait, does some stuff real fast (I think its trying to install the disk controller) Then says "Do you have any disk/scsi interfaces? <Yes> <No> <See hardware info> If i select Yes here, it brings me back to which driver should i try. If i select No, it gives me this error.

An error occured
An error occured - no valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem.

Now i know the raid is set up correctly because I have windows XP on another partition. I suspect its just getting confused because I'm not trying the correct drivers.

thanks agian.

[Moebius]

As for the chipset thats part of the problem, it seems to have like 5 different names. My the Asus A7V333 used the Via chipset, but the onboard raid controller seems like a seperate thing. It seems to be made by Promise. On the asus website it says:

IDE RAID (Optional) Promise 20276 ATA133 RAID controller support RAID 0,1

in the specs section of the motherboard. And in the download section of my motherboard, this is the WinXP drivers that I used:

pdc20276.zip V2.00.0.21 2001/01/01 WinXP Promise FastTrak133 Lite (tm) Controller Driver V2.00.0.21

And promise's website has no mention whatsoever of "pdc20276" or FastTrack133 Lite.

When i boot up, it reports itself as the MBFastTrack133 Lite. It also says that briefly when it detects hardware while booting into the Mandrake install.

[Dolda2000]

I think it sounds strange; it should be detecting them, and from you describe about the dmesg output, it even sounds as if it does. Would you mind trying another distro?

[Moebius]

Thats a good idea, I didn't think about that. I have SuSE running on my laptop and I'd like to try another distro. Do you know what thats best for learning?

I just found this on another forum. Someone said that linux doesn't support any promise cards yet. Then i found this link: http://linvdr.org/mailinglists/vdr/2.../msg00682.html

with a driver for SuSE 8.0 but it warns not to use it for other distros. Even if that driver did work for Mandrake, I don't know how i would use it. And i just checked the link and it says the file doesn't exist anyway oh well. I think I'll look into debian. Any other recommendations?

[Dolda2000]

You can always try RedHat, if not any else.
I would be very surprised if Gentoo wouldn't be able to cope with this. On the other hand, Gentoo takes very long to install, and although it has a rather good installation guide, I can't recommend it too much if you're too new to Linux. If you think you can handle it, though, I would gladly recommend Gentoo, since it's probably one of the best Linux distros there are.