Installing Fedora on an ITE IT8212F RAID0 array

[Kris Vorwerk]

Hello,

I've been a RedHat user since 4.0, and I've looked forward to updating
to the latest Fedora core (v1).

I'm currently running a fairly vanilla RedHat 9.0 system using JFS on an
IDE RAID0 array, accessed through the ITE IT8212F module driver.  This
driver is not part of the 2.4 series kernel, but source for it is
available on the manufacturer's website (c.f.
http://www.ite.com.tw/productInfo/Download.html).

I've downloaded and compiled the "iteraid.o" module for the
2.4.22-1.2115.nptl kernel that ships with Fedora v1.  I've made a driver
floppy disk by creating a gzip-compressed CPIO archive of my module, and
corresponding modinfo file.  (I have also tried the same disk with and
without a "modules.dep" file and "pcitable" file.)

When I start the Fedora install (in "expert text" mode), I cannot get
Fedora to recognize the disk.  It says that it can't find a "driver disk
identifier" and that it is "not a new format driver disk".  I'm not
entirely sure what these errors mean, and couldn't find any information
about them on Google.

So, thinking that it might be my module that was flaky, I decided to
skip the use of the driver disk, and go to the initial screen of the
Anaconda installer.  Instead of proceeding any further, I dropped to
Bash at that point, and insmod'd my iteraid.o driver.  (It works, and it
sees the RAID driver as a SCSI device.)  When I looked in /dev, I was a
little surprised to see that the sda files were missing -- I'm not sure
why they weren't there, but figure that they might have been created had
I gotten my driver disk to work.  So, I mknod'd the appropriate files
corresponding to my disk and partitions (/dev/sda, ..., /dev/sda3).  To
be sure that everything worked fine, I mounted my original JFS RH9 drive
(/dev/sda1) to a temporary directory.  Indeed, it worked great.  (That
doesn't surprise me, though, because I've been running this 8212F driver
on a 2.4.22 kernel quite stably for some time.)

So, I popped back to the Anaconda installer.  When it did a search for
previously installed versions, it did not find my RH9 installation on
/dev/sda1.  Moreover, whenever I went into disk druid, the /dev/sda
drive did not show up.  

As I've been using the 8212F driver for a while now without any hitches
(on a 2.4.22 kernel no less), I'm not entirely convinced that it's a
driver issue.  Rather, I think that my problem lies in my inability to
create a driver disk ... So, does anyone have any thoughts as to:

1) why my driver disk does not have a "driver disk identifier"?  (I
Googled and found nothing pertinent.)  (How do I make a "new format"
driver disk? :)

2) why my approach to getting this thing working still didn't allow the
Anaconda installer to see my /dev/sda partition?  (I presume that the
answer to this question lies in the fact that the installer does a
search for valid drives before I had a chance to load my module at the
bash prompt, and that's why it doesn't appear as an available
installation target.)


Regards,
Kris