Upgrading from RHEL3 to RHEL4 questions

[James Marcinek]

Hello All,

I want to upgrade me RHEL3 system to RHEL4 but have the following to address
before I can do it.

I installed a 'ITE RAIDExpress' card (ITE8212 Dual channel ATA RAID controller
(PCI version seems to be IT8212...)) to support a 200 Gig hard drive on my
system. Each time I've updated the kernel I've had to modify grub to pre-load
the scsi device:

eg: # cp -f iteraid.o /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/scsi/
    # chmod 755 /sbin/mkinitrd
    # mkinitrd -f --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod --with=iteraid \
      /boot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img 2.4.20-8

I have both the binaries (with the above kernel) and source for the drivers for
both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. I have the following 2 kernels to boot from:

kernel-2.4.21-20.0.1.EL
kernel-2.4.21-27.0.2.EL

Until recently I was able to simply do the previous listed instructions to make
it all work; however the kernel-2.4.21-27.0.2.EL doesn't work. In an effort to
get it working I tried to compile the source driver. There were no instructions
so I cd'd to the 2.4 source directory:

ls
iteraid.c  iteraid.h  Makefile

Since I had no instructions I issued only the 'make' command which resulted in
the following output:

make          
gcc -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE  -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer
-fno-strict-aliasing  -I. -I/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/scsi
-I/usr/src/linux-2.4/include -include
/usr/src/linux-2.4/include/linux/modversions.h -c -o iteraid.o iteraid.c
iteraid.c:4653: warning: `IdeMediaStatus' defined but not used

I then used the previously listed instructions for copying and modifying grub
but with no success.

So, I was going to upgrade the system but the installation process doesn't
recognize the device so that's where I'm at...

I know that during the install/upgrade process I can use a driver disk. Can I
use the 2.4 driver (iteraid.o) binary that's already compiled? Should I compile
the 2.6 source even though I'm at the 2.4 kernel?

Any advice would be appreciated. What I'm hoping for is not have to modify grub
everytime I update the kernel.

BTW- If anyone has knows of a Ultra ATA card that Red Hat recognizes
automatically to eleviate this headache I would like to hear about them...

Thanks,

James