I have a server that I'm installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on. The only hard disks in the machine are 3 60 gig IDE drives that are connected to a Promise SuperTrak SX6000 RAID controller in a RAID-5 array.

This server was previously running RedHat 7.2 on the same controller with no problems.

They do not have a driver for Enterprise Linux (or Fedora) on their website. They do have the source for the driver so that I can compile it myself. I compiled the driver against the source for the default kernel in RHEL (2.4.21-4.EL). I also compiled it with the options for the BOOT kernel. I then booted off the RedHat CD. When it told me it could not find a hard drive I hit Alt-F2 to get a prompt, mounted the floppy drive, and installed the module (pti_st.o) that I had compiled against the BOOT kernel. It installed fine. I unmounted the floppy, flipped back to the installation wizard, partitioned the drive and kept on going.

After the installation I popped the CD and rebooted. Kernel panic. I expected that. So I booted off the CD again, installed the driver, used mknod to create sda - sda8 and was able to mount the patitions. I mounted the root partition (/dev/sda3) as /mnt/scsi and I copied the driver I compiled (pti_st.o) into /mnt/scsi/lib/modules/2.4.21-4.EL/kernel/drivers/scsi and modified /mnt/scsi/etc/modules.conf to include the line "alias scsi_hostadapter pti_st".
Upon reboot the kernel still panics. Here are the messages it gives:

Code:

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kmod: failed to exec sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2
VFS: cannot open root device "sda3" or 08:03
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:03

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I don't do this kind of stuff too often...so I might have missed something obvious...anyone see anything I'm missing? Any suggestions (ie...ditch the card and run software RAID)? Mark, are you out there?

Thanks

you need to add the driver to the initrd.img file..

if you boot from the rescue CD mode, and mount the root filesystem, (and other filesystems necessary to make this trick work)

then you will need to run thi s command (chroot'd of course)

/sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.4.21-20.ELsmp.img 2.4.21-20.ELsmp.img

this of course assumes you are running 2.4.21-20.ELsmp

You can always add it by hand as well.
cp /boot/initrd.FOO /tmp/initrd.gz
mkdir /mnt/loop
mount -o loop /tmp/initrd /mnt/loop

much around with the files in that, umount, gzip, copy and boot

I've had to do this lots of times for oddball systems like that.

You may also want to look into kernel-unsupported RPM packages, stupid redhat decided that anything that wasn't tested to their standards would go in a separate RPM package. usefull things like SGI XFS, and IBM JFS, and reiserfs.. *FUME*

Roger:

Ah...right...makes sense. That was stupid of me. Ok, so there were directions when I downloaded the source on how to compile it and install it as a module. I'm a bit clueless on how to compile it into the kernel. I don't do this sort of thing much. Any advice?

see my initrd info.. it needs to be there for it to boot.

Thanks SuperQ, I'll try that.

Oddly enough...there doesn't appear to be an initrd****.img in the /boot directory. Is that normal? Should it be elsewhere on the disk?

There's a whole freaking setup needed to get modules to build for redhat binary kernels, and I have it all here right now.

If you give me the full driver source code, I can just plug it into my build tree, and it will spit out a Redhat Driver Diskette image with everything needed for your situation. Just insert the driver diskette when asked for it during RHEL installation. It will contain both a BOOT driver module, and a runtime driver module for several RHEL kernels.

Cheers

Thanks so much, Mark! The driver is available here.

hrm.. there should be one.. unless the instaler got confused because the disk driver magicaly appeared without it's knowlege

yea, that's the correct way to do redhat 3rd party drivers. I've never had to build my own driver disk before, so I didn't think about that option to start.

where is there documentation on making driver disks?

Okay, I just got back in and pulled it down.

Booting my devel system now..

EDIT: crunching away now, will take a few minutes to build (slow system).

More EDIT: At last check (a few weeks ago), RHEL3 had three kernels released for it, each of which has EIGHT variations based on processor type and SMP vs. UP. That makes for 24 different driver binaries, which is why the build tree is taking about half an hour to crunch through them all here..

The RHEL3 driver disks are now available here.

There are separate driver disk images for each of "athlon", "i386", "i586", and "i686". Choose the one that best matches your CPU, and if it fails to load correctly, try a different one.

These were built under RedHat9, not EL3, but I think they should work regardless of minor differences in the tool chain. Let me know how you make out with them.

To use them, you'll need a working Linux system, from where you can do something like this (below) to create an actual floppy diskette:
Code:

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   zcat  dd.img-i686.gz  >  /dev/fd0h1440

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Cheers

Just a bit of an update...the driver disk worked great (i686 wouldn't work...only i386). The installer was smart enough to add the line into the modules.conf, but not smart enough to copy the driver to the disk or make an initrd image. When the installation was done, I simply mounted the drive, copied the driver to /lib/modules/2.4.20-4.EL/kernel/drivers/scsi/ then ran "/sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.4.20-4.EL 2.4.20-4.EL". I mounted the initrd image as described by SuperQ to make sure that the driver was in there, and it was. Rebooted and paydirt! Thank-you so much guys...I sifted through hours of garbage on the net trying to figure this out, and got the answers within a matter of minutes here.

yep.. no problem.. it's one of those things that I say "damn, what a pain in the ass" and then I remember.. "damn, something like that would be impossible to fix in windows" So i go on helping people with advanced linux questions