[Nottingham] Big biiig problem regarding IDE-RAID

Alex Herington nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
Tue Jul 15 13:52:00 2003


| Both disks developing bad sectors is something you want to look
| into, frankly
| I don't believe it!!  Either you have managed to snag an IDE cable and
| getting data errors, the controller and/or disks overheated, hot weather is
| the room well vented or got a/c?

Maybe one of them developed problems before the other? I don't know. I'm not
sure how that'd manifest itself in a RAID1 array either. The room's air
conditioned and the servers have large fans pulling cold air directly over the
disks. As for snaggin IDE cables, I haven't been in the cases for months :/


| Finally there have been problem in some recent-ish kernel versions with the
| Promise drivers, I think 2.4.19 - 2.4.20 roughly were affected,
| some kernels
| couldn't boot them, so if you recently did a kernel upgrade, you might want
| to look into driver issues as a posibility.

Mmm, I've heard similar things. Where? Ahh yes.. the boot output "Promise
Fasttrak(tm) Softwareraid driver for linux version 0.03beta". Great. And we're
running 2.4.20.

Installing Debian on these chipsets is such a bizarre experience. If you
disable the onboard IDE RAID via the motherboard jumper, Debian will detect
your normal IDE ports as /dev/ataraid/d0.. etc. I can't think of any logical
way to explain this. I've had enough of IDE RAID!

Regards,
Alex.