SATA + RAID + advice sought

[Jon Hill]

Hi All

I have been having some problems with a Fedora Core 2 setup. Sorry this 
posting is a bit long winded, but if there is anyone with experience of using 
RAID 1 with SATA then I could do with a bit of advice.

The system has  2 x SATA 80gig Hitachi Deskstar drives and a promise SATA 
controller. 

The system ran ok for a while but we started to get disk IO errors reporting 
from one of the drives. It looks like a hardware failure but I am wondering 
if I may have misconfigured the software RAID which could have caused the IO 
errors. A setup a single partition but put a SWAP partition on one drive 
only; I am wondering if this could have been the cause of my disk errors.

Since installing Core 2, there have been a number of kernel updates. The first 
updated kernel would not boot so we had to drop back to the original one. 
Most recent kernel updates have not been applied because the boot loader is 
sat on the disk that failed! The machine has managed to boot from the failed 
disk but then this drive gets disabled once the kernel has loaded.

I have now got a boot loader onto the other drive and am using a single drive. 
I think part of my troubles may be  caused by the combination of the promise 
SATA controller and a PCI SCSI Controller (INITIO INIC 1060P). For example, I 
have tried to boot from a Fedora Core 3 CD (network install version) and it 
hangs whilst trying to 'load sata drivers.' Removing the SCSI card seems to 
solve this.

I would like to get a second drive backup and running with a properly 
configured RAID 1. Most important is to get the DAT drive on the SCSI card 
installed again. I am wondering if the combination of hardware I am using is 
not yet stable enough under Linux if it is recommended that I forget about 
SATA for now?

Any words of wisdom appreciated.
Log output shown below.


Cyril

 --------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------ 

WARNING:  Kernel Errors Present
   Buffer I/O error on device hde, l...:  18 Time(s)
   end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector...:  2 Time(s)
   end_request: I/O error, dev hde, sector...:  18 Time(s)
   hde: dma_intr: error=0x40 { Uncorrect...:  18 Time(s)
   hde: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }...:  18
Time(s)



Nov  9 14:28:47 hde: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError },
LBAsect=16504, high=0, low=16504, sector=16504 
Nov  9 14:28:47 end_request: I/O error, dev hde, sector 16504 
Nov  9 14:28:52 hde: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete
Error } 
Nov  9 14:28:52 hde: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError },
LBAsect=16384, high=0, low=16384, sector=16384 
Nov  9 14:28:52 end_request: I/O error, dev hde, sector 16384 
Nov  9 14:28:56 hde: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete
Error } 
Nov  9 14:28:56 hde: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError },
LBAsect=16384, high=0, low=16384, sector=16384 
Nov  9 14:28:56 end_request: I/O error, dev hde, sector 16384