[NBLUG/talk] Finding an compatible IDE motherboard

[Ross Thomas]

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006 09:25:49 -0800, "Todd Cary"
<todd at aristesoftware.com> said:
> 
> Conceptually, what you say makes sense.  Red Hat 9 works with
> the BE7-RAID board so what would be different in Centos (Red
> Hat Enterprise 4) so that it will not work?  Granted, the Kernel is
> different in RH Enterprise from RH 9, but is it that different?

The biggest difference between RH9 and the others is that RH9
uses a 2.4 kernel while the others have a 2.6 kernel.  This is a
major change and will efffectively nullify any drivers that may
have been provided previously.

> On the Highpoint site, I here is this:
> 
> http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/bios_rr133.htm

This would be a really unfortunate turn of events.  What does
the lspci command report for that device?  You'll need to run
the command as root to get the extra info (-vvv).

   lspci -vvv

> Then I had this exchange some time ago where the proprietary
> drivers are discussed, but I am not sure what to make of it.
> 
> http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2005-September/052353.html
> 
> Does this make sense to you?

Yep.  And I'm hoping that your device isn't an RR133 but
it could very well be.  I've seen a couple of people say that
a later version of the 2.6 kernel supports it, if compiled in.
I'd venture to guess that recent distros have abandonded it
since it is neither enterperise nor very open.

One thing you can do is download the CentOS Livecd and
see if it at least recognizes the device.  If it does, then all is
not lost.  If not, it may mean that you are stuck at RH9 with
the current setup.

*** Please do a backup before playing with the system. ***

If the device can be put into JBOD mode after a backup you
can then use standard software Linux RAID to achieve the
same result.  In JBOD mode they should just show as a couple
of standard IDE or SCSI disks (fingers crossed).

How much info is on this meta-disk?  Is it in RAID0 or RAID1?

Whoever thought turning RAID controllers into Winmodems was
a good thing should be taken out and shot.  Repeatedly & often.
Daily if possible.  :-(

Ross.

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