Problems installing Debian on PIII using Adaptec 2400A RAID 5 array as boot drive
Hi Everyone,
been using Debian for about 7 months now and loving every minute of
it... so far, I managed to install Debian on more than 10 machines
(some my own, some in the office and some for friends whom I'm trying
to encourage to use Linux) and so far besides some quirks, the
experience has been quite good... In fact, a few months ago, I shifted
from using my Win XP machine to my Debian Machine as my main machine
at home... while my XP Machine is just left for me to play EVE-online
:)
Anyway, recently I was handed a PIII Machine which has a 3 disk RAID 5
array created using an Adaptec 2400A IDE RAID Controller... I wanted
to install Debian on it for use as an Intranet Web Server for the
office... Well, I booted off the Debian 3.0 Disc 1, used the bf24
option and discovered that I could not find any hard drives on
board... looking around the USENET for clues, I found out that you
needed to use a floppy to load in the required modules to get Debian
to recognise the RAID Controller.. I managed to find a floppy image at
http://people.debian.org/~blade/install/preload/ and it managed to
allow my Debian installation to happily detect the RAID Controller...
I then proceeded to partition my disk as follows:
/dev/sda0 /boot ext2 700 MB
/dev/sda1 / Reisfer FS 110 GB
/dev/sd3 SWAP 1.2 GB
I set a swap partition to 1.2 GB as I have 512 Meg of RAM and I think
I read somewhere that you should have a swap partition with a minimum
of twice your available RAM right?
Anyway, I made /dev/sda0 bootable and rebooted the machine... what
greeted me was a blinking cursor and a beeping sound...
I also tried to reinstall and add the some RAID5 kernel modules during
the setup but that doesn't help either...
Any suggestions any one? Apparently there isn't much people on USENET
with 2400A Linux machines as I could only find a few posting and their
situations doesn't help mine much...
--
Best regards,
Derek mailto:sdchew@ieee.org
Reply to: