RAIDExpress 133 RAID problem...

[SMNug]

My problem is with ataraid, I have done a hd install of (the latest knoppix cd) debian.

loads up and runs fine apartfrom my backup drives dont exist anymore or arnt accesable?

I have 3 ide cd roms and a harddrive plugged into the norm ide's and my ataraid running two more harddrives
the cd drives and my main drive are fine but anything plugged into ataraid is missing, or hidden i dont realy know lol

I am new to linux so have little understanding of anything, but i have searched the net and fixed most of the problems i have
found so far but this one is beyond me, when i installed xp I installed the RAIDExpress 133 RAID driver for this device and its working fine in xp.

I have read that this is a comman problem but nowere seems to explain it in anyway a noob like me can understand.

I would be very happy if somone could give me a hand or at least point me in the right direction, thewn i can wipe this dreded xp from my life :)

thanks in advance, and if more info is needed just ask and i will try and figger out how to find what you need to know

[Harry Kuhman]

The raid is acomplished under windows by a software driver that spreads the data across multiple drives. Without a driver for Linux that exactly matches the way that the data is stored under Windows you are not going to access these files from Linux. While Linux has some very good raid technology, you can't expect it to match every raid scheeme ever done for Windows. The bottom line is that you pretty much painted yourself into a corner when you installed raid for Windows. My suggestion would be to back up all of your critical information from windows, install a version of Linux that you like (do not "install" Knoppix) and reload your data from the backups that you made.

[SMNug]

Thanks for that, At the moment im duel booting between xp and linux so i do have access to these drives when i boot to xp.

My aim is to scrap xp all together, so what would be the best way for me to gain access to these drives in linux?

I only installed the raid becouse i had no way of installing the drives without it. what hardware could i replace it with so it worked in linux?

Sorry to be a pain but i realy like knoppix / Debian and im only duel booting while i replace all my needed software with a linux equivent.

[Harry Kuhman]

I only installed the raid becouse i had no way of installing the drives without it. what hardware could i replace it with so it worked in linux?

Sorry to be a pain but i realy like knoppix / Debian and im only duel booting while i replace all my needed software with a linux equivent.
I may not have all of the answers for you, and I hope that I don't give bad advice, but you're not a pain.

I don't know anything about your raid hardware. But my experience with raid is that I got a motherboard with two normal IDE ports on it and a supposed raid controler and two additional IDE connectors for the raid, offering 0,1 or 10 raid. I put hard drives on the raid IDE connections, but I did not raid them. So far all software that I have tried likes the non-raid drivers on this raid controler just fine, including Windows, several flavors of DOS, Knoppix and several other Live Linux CDs and DVDs. My best guess is that Debian and Knoppix will like your hardware just fine, but they don't know how to deal with the raided disks. This is all just theory, of course, but I can give you a way to test the theory before you unraid your system:

If you have any spare IDE hard drive lying around (size is not very critical, but too small is better than too large) and you are not frightened by screwdrivers, try the following: power down the system and remove the AC power cord. Unplug all of your raided IDE drives. If you have a spare IDE cable I would unplug the IDE cable(s) at the controler side (note which is which if you have 2 cables currently), otherwise unplug at the drive side. Plug the spare drive into the raid system, making very sure that it is the only hard drive in the system.

The next step may depend on what was on the drive and your skill with Knoppix tools. If you don't know what was on the drive or you know it has no partitions, it might be simplest to put the system back with only this spare drive connected and boot into DOS first. Then use Fdisk to make sure there is a fat partition and then reboot and format it. If you can do this in DOS without any raid drives then I expect you are home free. When you boot Knoppix you should see any partitions on the hard disk if there are any there. And you should be able to create one if the disk is empty. As long as you are certain that the raided drives are disconnected you can't really do much harm, and this test would confirm my theory that the other disks will be available to you once the system is un-raided.

Of course, that leads you to shutting down again and reconnecting the raid system and removing the test disk, then backing everything up so that you can leave windows and the old raid system behind.

I have seen some mention that the latest Linux kernel has some good Linux raid support in it. I'll leave you to decide if you want to try to work with that (and if you do if it supports your hardware), or if you just want to run unraided drives connected to the controler.

And in the (I think) unlikely event that the connectors where your raid drives are plugged in now turn out to really only work if you have the windows raid driver running, can't you still connect the hard drives to the computer's main IDE connector, once you get the raid data off of them?

[SMNug]

OK, here it is,

I have two IDE cables already and no extra places for more, both cables have two ide devices on them

cable one has an ide hard drive as master and a cd writer as slave.
cable two has an ide dvd drive as master and a dvd writer as slave.

all of which I use regular :(, if i didnt i would just unplug somthing and plug the other drives in, but this is not an option.

I unplugged the second cable and replaced it with the cable from my ataraid and re booted...

in xp I had access to all drives and the one cd drive that was still conected.
in Debian I had access to the same. all my drives are fat32 appart from the partition that Debian is installed on

So if i was to remove the ataraid card from its pci slot is there a different way I could conect my backup drives?
something that could give me the extra ide slots or is this a new motherboard job?

I do believe there must be a way to get this raid thing working as I have been googling arround the net and found a few referances to people getting this type of card working in linux but I could not find anything that says how and as i know very little about linux I have no real undestanding of how to compile binarys and mount drives like some of the forum posts sugest.

there for i would much rather replace the raid with somthing easy could anyone help with some sugestions?

[Harry Kuhman]

I unplugged the second cable and replaced it with the cable from my ataraid and re booted...i
This seems to be quite the opposite of what I suggersted (I hope no harm was done to the data). My purpose was to see if Knoppix could see a normal drive attached to the raid drive, not a raid drive attached to your motherboard controllers.

Question 1. Do you have any spare IDE drives, even old small ones?

if yes then: unplug the first IDE cable from your motherboard entirely and disconnect the raid drives from the ataraid card. jumper the spare drive as a master and connect it to the ataraid card. Boot Knoppix from a disc in the DVD reader (still connected to the motherboard by ide cable 2). Check if it can see and access the hard drive, the only hard drive on the system, on the ataraid card.

if no to question 1 then you still have a hard drive that you could use for this test, the hard drive normally attached to your motherboard IDE controller, as it is not part of any raid array. Attach it to the raid controller's IDE connection and again boot Knoppix. If it can see files on the hard drive then Linux can use that ataraid controler as additional IDE interfaces without any raid drivers (and can likely support it as a Linux based RAID system with the drivers in the new Kernel if that's something that you want to do).

Put everything back where it started after the test.

[SMNug]

Befor I took my computer appart i decided to see if the dvd distobution on knoppix was any differnt.

after the 3-4 hour download I burned it to disk and placed it in the drive booted from the disk only to find there was an error on the disk and it doent work.
however I did see a difference while it was trying to load. just after the image apears it lists 4 drives when im booting from the harddrive and when i tried the dvd it listed all 6.

So the dvd must recognise my ataraid :). now all i have to do is get it to download properly

Im having truble with that bit now. its started showing as only 47mb when i try to download.

Im off to try ftp. I will let you know if the dvd fixes my problem, once i have managed a download lol

[Harry Kuhman]

Im having truble with that bit now. its started showing as only 47mb when i try to download.
Im off to try ftp. .....l
This has been discussed here many times recently. You can't download an iso over 4 gig to a fat directory (although that doesn't sound like your problem) and even when downloading to NTFS many download tools suffer from the 4 gig limit. Your best bet by far is to use Bittorrent. It's faster when configured properly than the mirrors and it is more accurate, as it does error checking as it downloads and fixes any errors that do exist. In fact it could have corrected your old download without downloading everything again if you had kept the old ISO and used Bittorrent to download to the same directory. You also are apparently not following the Downloading Faq's advice to chech the md5 sum of the ISO before burning or you wouldn't have had this problem. I suggest reading all of the downloading faq and not saying "I've never done that before so I'll just ignore it" when you get to parts that would introduce you to something new.

[SMNug]

Thanks for all your help with this matter, I have finally got it all working. even though I cant get bit torrent to work, so i used the wget way and that worked fine. I have loads to learn I know this so you will probably see loads more posts from me round here.

I still cant work out why the dvd would find hardware that the cd cant but what the h@ll it works :D

thanks again