Re: sil3114 problem
On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 07:49:08AM +0200, the.death.angel@gmx.net wrote:
> I got a new Computer the last days and tried to install an operating system
> on it.
> I used the amd64 version of sarge. When I boot, the debian installer shows,
> that it loads the sil3114 module. However, when doing the partitioning,
> debian shows me three independent hard disks, although I set up a raid array
> in the BIOS. I know, that sil3114 is only a fake raid controller, but I
> think, when the driver is loaded, the operating system should not recognize
> this fact and show me the array. Am I wrong there?
When the driver loads it looks at what is connected to the controller,
and since it is a plain sata controller, it sees multiple disks. What
the BIOS wants to pretend to have doesn't matter to the driver. On a
hardware raid controller you would only see the volumes that were
created, since after all a real raid controller is going to have a
driver for using that part of the hardware (your board doesn't have raid
hardware so the driver would have to do the work, and so far it
doesn't.)
> Even if this is not really belonging here (but might still be a hint for a
> solution), Windows XP (32 bit) crashes completely, before I am able to
> create/ select a partition, no matter if the sil drivers are loaded or not.
>
> I am using the Gigabyte GA-K8N Ulta-SLI mainboard.
>
> I would be very thankful, if someone could help me out here. I do not want
> to buy a Promise controller, but will have to, if I can not set up my system
> with the sil3114.
If you want hardware raid, buy a hardware raid controller with linux
support. 3ware and areca come to mind (although areca is not in the
kernel yet, so one would have to add the drivers first).
Sil and Promise and Highpoint for the most part are proprietary software
raid, which use code in the bios to fake the raid whenever anything uses
the dos/bios calls, and switches to doing the work in the driver once
the os loads the driver. The linux Sil3114 driver supports only the
sata controller, not the fake raid part. dmraid might work with it, but
is not included with most distributions yet (and probably isn't even
considered stable yet either).
Linux software raid is the way to go for relibable, fast, portable raid.
Len Sorensen
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