[PLUG] Promise drive controller

[Robert Kopp]

Hi, it's me again. Anyhow I purchased a 160-GB hard
drive that was too large for my BIOS to support, and
installed an offboard drive controller for that
reason. Windows XP has a driver for this controller
and installed it without any trouble. And that's
saying quite a bit, in view of XP's notorious driver
problems. 

And what about Red Hat 9.0? Promise Technology's Web
site offers drivers for this card, but when I followed
their instructions, including kernel parameters, the
drive was not recognized. Then I tried the
installation without their assistance, and the drive
was recognized, though as hde. The installation
program was already beginning to install packages into
newly-created ext3 partitions when it encountered
problems and gave up. 

Could it be media problems, or inadequate support for
the Promise controller? I made the disks myself,
though they passed the md5sum check and the additional
media check that Red Hat provides. I would be willing
to try another distribution, if that is more likely to
succeed--including, of course, Fedora, which I have
not yet downloaded. I would be particularly interested
in hearing from people who have distributions
successfully installed with such RAID controllers.



=====
Robert "Tim" Kopp
http://analytic.tripod.com/

"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies."--Frederick Nietzsche