Abit KR7A 133 Raid Motherboad & Linux

Printable View

12-05-2002
goldfist

Abit KR7A 133 Raid Motherboad & Linux

Hi, I'm looking at downloading either Red Hat 8.0 or Mandrake 9.0 linux, but before I put the time and effort into it I want to know if it will run on my system. Currently I'm running the following:
Abit KR7A 133 Raid motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Leadtek WinFast A250 Ulta TD MyVIVO Edition
2 Western Digital 40 GB hard drives in a Raid 0 contral array
Liteon JLMS LTD-166S DVD drive
Linksys LNE 100 TX Ethernet Card
Creative Lab Sound Blaster Live MP3+ sound card
256 Mb RAM
I have read on several different forums that Mandrake 8.2 doesn't work with my motherboard, but all of these post where over 6 months old. Also I know through personal experience that Red Hat 7.3 wouldn't installed because of a highpoint raid drive conflicted error. Now I want to know did Red Hat or Mandrake fix these problems so that in their last release or should I wait until the next version comes out. Also if they do support my hardware can I run either OS in a raid 0 array or will I have to do what most people did with Mandrake 8.2 and disable raid completely. I hope you'll help me will this, because I would hate to spend 9 hours downloading linux only to find that my motherboard or something else is not supported. Also sorry if this is post in the wrong spot, but I still new here.
Thank you Max Goldfist
12-05-2002
slant6

Hi,

I am using Mandrake 8.2 and have upgraded to 9.0, but I moved back to 8.2 because I didn't want to have to use gcc 3.2. I have some similar hardware.

I have the following similar hardware on my machine and it works with no problems:
Western Digital drives
Linksys LNE 100 ethernet
Creative Labs Soundblaster 512

I have an ASUS DVD-ROM drive. Personally, I stay away from Lite-on products no matter what operating system I plan to use!

Regarding the ABIT board:
I'm not sure if RAID is supported or not, but you can ask around about that. That's really surprising that you'd have trouble with ABIT. I have used several ASUS and TYAN motherboard without any trouble.

What is Leadtek WinFast A250 Ulta TD MyVIVO Edition?
Is that your video card?

What kind of video card do you have? Does the ABIT have onboard video? If so, what graphics set? That could be a problem, too. If so, you could always buy a separate video card and disable onboard video.

You can also try checking mandrake's supported hardware database:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/hardware.php3

Good luck! :)
12-05-2002
Dolda2000

You could always try downloading one of those one-floppy linuxes and see if you can find your hard drives and mount them. It might be a little hard if you've never used linux or any other unix before, though.
12-06-2002
goldfist

Quote:

Originally Posted by slant6

I have an ASUS DVD-ROM drive. Personally, I stay away from Lite-on products no matter what operating system I plan to use!

I didn't know that there was a problem with Lite-on products, all the reviews I read said Lite-on made good products at a low price.

Quote:

Originally Posted by slant6

I'm not sure if RAID is supported or not, but you can ask around about that. That's really surprising that you'd have trouble with ABIT. I have used several ASUS and TYAN motherboard without any trouble.

Other then this I haven't had any other problems. The problem with linux is that it installed fine until I rebooted and got to LI in LILO and it crash. The next time I reboot it popped up an error message about a broken control array. I wiped everything out, reload windows and checked on the internet and found someone saying on different message forum, that Linux did that because it didn't recognize my raid controller. The thing that gets me is that I fould the instructions that highpoint wrote, to fix this problem in Red Hat, and it still didn't work. Now while I'm new to Linux and I really want this to work, I while not disable half my motherboard to do as that persons solution was. His work about was to disable the Raid controller, use one hard drive on one IDE channel, put everything else on the other, forget about dual booting with windows and live with it. I sorry, but to me that's not a workable solution to me. I wouldn't mind if I couldn't use raid as long as I could use those IDE channels. I've seen several other workarounds that only say disable the raid controller and run it without the 2 IDE channels, but to me that like saying you can run my graphics card only in 256 color even though when I got it couple months ago it was one of the top of the line.

Quote:

Originally Posted by slant6

What is Leadtek WinFast A250 Ulta TD MyVIVO Edition?
Is that your video card?

What kind of video card do you have? Does the ABIT have onboard video? If so, what graphics set? That could be a problem, too. If so, you could always buy a separate video card and disable onboard video.

My motherboard didn't come with any onboard video or sound because in the past I had a lot of problems with any old IBM, but thanks for asking. Also the Winfast A250 is my graphics card and it's a GeForce4 TI 4600. I know leadtek had on their site some information about how you use the generic Linux driver from Nvidia.

Quote:

Originally Posted by slant6

You can also try checking mandrake's supported hardware database:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/hardware.php3

I've tried both Mandrake and Red Hat, Red Hat has nothing on Abit motherboards will Mandrake on list the KR7A board not the KR7A 133 RAID. Now I don't know if that make a differences or not, but if it doesn't please tell me. As I said before as long as I can use those to channels I don't care if their in a control array.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dolda2000

You could always try downloading one of those one-floppy linuxes and see if you can find your hard drives and mount them. It might be a little hard if you've never used linux or any other unix before, though.

Thats a good idea, but will they recognize a raid control array or will they need special drives?

Thanks for all your help so far :) Max Goldfist
12-06-2002
Dolda2000

Quote:

Thats a good idea, but will they recognize a raid control array or will they need special drives?

That was precisely what I intended that you could find out. If it does work with them, it will most likely work with the kernel on the distribution's installation CD.
12-06-2002
slant6

Quote:

I didn't know that there was a problem with Lite-on products, all the reviews I read said Lite-on made good products at a low price.

Sorry, I don't mean to insult your choice in hardware, or anything it's just that I have heard that Lite-on is using cheap low-quality parts and have you tried going to their website?

Anyway, it seems like there has to be some way to disable just the RAID without having to turn off your whole IDE channel. That's ridiculous, I know, but how many drives do you have anyway? Can you just use the non-RAID IDE channels? You can still support up to four devices. If you've got more drives than that then keep asking around. Try Mandrake support, RedHat, try posting to Linux Journal, Linux Magazine and/or Linux Format. Maybe one of those guys will know if someone here can't figure it out. This one's beyond my expertise. Sorry, and good luck.