How-to Install Redhat linux 9.0 on a Promise 376 RAID Partition.

Author: Anders Lynge Esbensen

It seems that promise has released a official driver: http://www.promise.com/support/download/download2_eng.asp?productId=104&category=driver&os=3

Home made Driver disk for Fedora Core1, download here

I wrote this howto out of memory, so you have to fill in the blanks.

When i bought two new SATA harddrives for my computer i decided to reinstall Redhat linux from scratch, hence i already
had a workning RH8.0 installation on my computer. I this the whole installation process took me about 6 hours, partly because
of my intense hangover and partly beceause it was VEREY difficult.

Step 1: Getting the driver

After a long and hard search i found the promise raiddriver on http://www.antgel.co.uk/compsci/linux/promise_raid.shtml.
This page contained some partial sourcecode for the driver, so i downloaded the source package.

I installed the kernel-source package from the redhat9 CD's, and linked /usr/src/linux to the newly installed source.

Then I compiled the new driver, you can get it here, so you won't have to do this step: ft3xx.o

I copyed the driver and the insmod program on to a floppy:
cp ft3xx.o /mnt/floppy
cp /sbin/insmod /mnt/floppy (you really need to do this)

Step2: Begining the installation

Put the RH9 CD in your cdrom and reboot your computer. When you get to the installation bootloader, type "linux noprobe"
on the command line (without the")

At some point you wille be asked if you have any driverdisks. When this happens pres CTRL+ALT+F2 to get to
the shell. Do the following:

mkdir floppy
mount /dev/fd0 floppy
mkdir tmp
cp floppy/insmod tmp/
cp floppy/ft3xx.o tmp/
umount floppy
./tmp/insmod -f tmp/ft3xx.o

You the get a warning, but hopefully no error message!

Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get back to the installation

Continue the installation as usual....

Be sure to configure grub to include your old installation

Step3: Fixing the installation

Now RH9 is installed, but when you boot it you get some message that tells you that the root filesystem couldn't be mounted.
Boot your old system.

do a insmod ft3xx.o once you have booted, and mount the RAIDed partitions /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, ... to some where

copy ft3xx.o to new_root/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/scsi/ where new_root is the RAID partition

add this line to /etc/modules.conf and to new_root/etc/modules.conf

alias scsi_hostadapter ft3xx

do a

depmod -a -C new_root/etc/modules.conf -b new_root/lib/modules/ 2.4.20-8 (it this doesn't work read man depmod)

ln -s new_root/lib/modules/2.4.20-8 /lib/modules

use mkinitrd to make a new ramdisk
mkinitrd new_root/boot/initrd-2.4.20-8_ft.img 2.4.20-8

edit new_root/boot/grub/grub.conf
to use the new ramdisk

Reboot the system!