Successfully booting on SiI3112 Raid 0 with Gentoo!

[Chris Nicola]

Thanks Carl.  I have used a grub boot disk and I got it working.  I want 
to thank Hienz and everyone else who has helped with dmraid.  I also 
want to thank Gerte for the gen2dmraid disk.  It has been very useful 
for me in testing dmraid and now finally getting it installed.  It seems 
to be working and stable at the moment I will let you know if anything 
nasty happens *crosses fingers*. 

I will put together a detailed description of what I did to get it 
working for the NF7-S/SiI3112 Raid 0 setup I have. 

The main thing that needs to be done if you are going to use Gerte's 
method is to remember to compile the DM and SCSI modules you need for 
your system into the kernel.  When you use the .config from the 
gen2dmraid cd they are modules (for obvious reasons) and so you need to 
go into the config and remove the modules you dont need and make sure 
the ones you do are compiled into the kernel.

Other than that his initrd works like a charm for me, but his method of 
installing grub doesn't.  Use Carl's suggestion below to install grub if 
it isn't working for you either.

Also be sure to look at his post in the gentoo forums.  It is much more 
detailed that what he has on the gen2dmraid site.  It also covers how to 
install gentoo using this program.  Somthing that those who are having 
trouble installing linux on their systems will want to have.

I suppose there still isn't a solid way to install Fedora Core on a raid 
only system, right?

Thanks,
Chris

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

>Molle Bestefich schrieb:
>  
>
>>Chris Nicola wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Yes I am having the exact same problem.  I am actually just going to try
>>>and lower version of grub for now but I will try this patch if that
>>>still happens.
>>>      
>>>
>>Just did this:
>>==========
>>grub> device (hd0) /dev/mapper/hpt37x_ehgjaggaf
>>grub> root (hd0,5)/boot
>>Filesystem type is reiserfs, partition type 0x83
>>grub> setup (hd0)
>>==========
>>
>>and it destroyed my RAID0.
>>GRUB is such a piece of crap :-).
>>    
>>
>
>Um, GRUB works fine for me, even on totally crazy RAID systems not yet
>supported by dmraid. There is a well-kept secret you need to know:
>You can install GRUB just fine IFF you boot from a GRUB boot floppy.
>NEVER (except for trivial configurations) use the GRUB shell running
>under any operating system.
>
>
>  
>
>>It must be severely broken; since if it just sticked to writing to the
>>device I pointed it at (hpt37x_ehgjaggaf) which is a RAID0 "virtual
>>disk" / whatever, it should never be able to overwrite metadata out on
>>the physical disk.
>>
>>Anyway, just wanted to tell you to beware.
>>Gerte has a GRUB example on his page where he does setup (hd0,5)
>>instead of setup (hd0), perhaps that's how it's meant to work.
>>    
>>
>
>Regards,
>Carl-Daniel
>  
>