Adaptec 1210SA RAID1 not recognised

[juerg]

I am trying to get an Adaptec 1210SA RAID controller with 2 SATA drives (RAID 1) to work.
After booting, the controller is recognised but it takes about 8 minutes to boot with lot's of messages like "hde: lost interrupt" and "hdg: lost interrupt".
How could I get it to work? (after booting has finished, there is no harddisk available).

Thank you in advance for all suggestions. Juerg

[Yakumo]

same problem (3.3 before 3.4 now, thread updated) , no one seems to know the answers..

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7133&highlight=

[Yakumo]

I only actually have a single drive though, JBOD, the controller is detected but checking for drives takes FOREVER , it takes about 10 minutes to boot knoppix, and then doesn't actually allow access to the drives at all..

someone suggested :

hdparm -X66 -d1 /dev/hdg

to access the drive after booting, but i doubt that'll help on your RAID config..

i'll try that next time i try knoppix, but i'm still more interested in getting it to boot in arround a minute as it does on non sata machines.

oh, 3.4 also doesn't seem to recognize my internal zip drive either :(

[Yakumo]

have you had any problems with your A1210SA btw? I'm often finding disk corruption after shutdown's, it practically never happens when jsut rebooting though, it's always fixed by a scandisk and windows runs hapilly for days, except when i try to play many .MOV files, they cause lockups instantly unless i move them to a standard IDE drive first?

the last driver release for windows (1.00.10) wouldn't even boot my drive untill i moved it to port 1 instead of port 0 on the controller, though previous drivers booted fine before and after...

i've beena little unsure about RMA'ing as adaptec have said there are problems with greater than 120gig drives (mines a maxtor 160 gig and all drive tests are passed) and keep releasing driver updates that say they fix things, so is it a flawed part, or am i jsut unlucky and a replacement of the same model would actually improve things?

/me pissed at adaptec automated tech support and lack of user forums...

[juerg]

I've found an .rpm with drivers from Adaptec. I converted it into .deb with alien.
Tomorrow, I'll install an additional harddisk (ATA), make a Knoppix hd-install and hope that the above mentioned .deb will work.
Alternatively, I will try to use kernel 2.6.5.

If someone has already tried the above, or if someone has a better idea, please let me know! thanks. Juerg

[juerg]

I've tried the newest version of knoppix 3.4 using the knoppix26-option to get kernel 2.6.5. Unfortunately, the harddisk is still not seen. Booting takes 15 minutes and I get "lost interrup" messages.

[juerg]

I have removed the Adaptec card so that I can use the 2 SATA drives. Most likely I will set up a software RAID.
Best regards Juerg

[yani]

I've been using this card for a while in linux - the trick is do NOT use the IDE drivers, instead use the libata (under SCSI low level drivers) in the kernel. Unfortunately every livecd I've found uses the IDE module which doesn't work at all with the 1210sa. The lost interrupt bug was fixed ages ago in libata, for some reaon the ide driver has not been :S.

If anyone makes a custom knoppix or live cd with a kernel that works (i.e. ide sil3112 driver disabled, libata sil3112 driver built-in) please let me know.

[juerg]

Just to confirm: Are you really saying, that you could set up the RAID array with 2 SATA-drives so that Linux does see the RAID array as if it were one single drive?
(I tried so many different things that I can hardly believe what you are saying...)