woody vs. raid array

[Will Trillich <will@serensoft.com>]

i've managed to get an actual budget to put together a woody
server with a real raid -- and of course, it's not going
smoothly.

	athlon xp 1800+
	768mb eec-registered ddr ram
	dual 160gb (western digital, 7200rpm) drives, raid1 (mirror)
	fasttrak100 lite

yet, during startup from the woody iso (which is exactly the
same as what i get when booting the 2.4.21-pre3 fd .bin image i
got from

	http://ttul.org/~rrsadler/linux-promise/

) i see in dmesg that Promise Fasttrak(tm) Software raid driver
is loaded and being tested, but not finding any raid arrays:

	Promise Fasttrak(tm) Softwareraid driver 0.03beta: No raid array found
	Highpoint HPT370 Softwareraid driver for linux version 0.01
	No raid array found
	<snip>
	md: linear personality registered as nr 1
	md: raid0 personality registered as nr 2
	md: raid1 personality registered as nr 3
	md: raid5 personality registered as nr 4
	raid5: measuring checksumming speed
	<snip>
	md: multipath personality registered as nr 7
	md: md driver 0.90.0 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27
	md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
	md: autorun ...
	md: ... autorun DONE.
	<snip>

i noticed that the instructions at

	http://ttul.org/~rrsadler/linux-promise/

mention the FastTrak TX2000 Ultra ATA/133 UDMA RAID Card (the
133) whereas mine is the fastrak100 lite... is that a significant
difference?

at bootup, after DEL is no longer an option, ^F gets me into the
raid configuration area, before the lilo boot (whether from cd
or floppy) and all seems healthy, there.

when i boot the boot-floppies (which, like the cd-rom, also
apologize for being called boot floppies :) all seems smooth
sailing until "partition hard disk" which lists only /dev/hdc and
/dev/hda; these appear to be the two drives composing the raid
array. each worked fine plugged in as a sole ide-drive; complete
install went like a dream -- without the raid setup, of course.
now it's supposed to be under /dev/ataraid/d0, but cfdisk (alt-f2
to get to a command line from the install console) says "Cannot
open disk drive".

what tests can i make to pin down what's stuck?

==

note -- all these log entries are re-keyed, of course, since i
can't get the raid system up and running. two keyboards, two
monitors, two hands :), two disks, no raid :(

==

i found the above resources at

	http://colby.tjs.org/~brendandg/promise-ft66-howto/howto.html

-- 
I use Debian/GNU Linux version 3.0;
Linux boss 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i586 unknown
 
DEBIAN NEWBIE TIP #4 from Will Trillich <will@serensoft.com>
:
Want to know WHAT FILES ARE PROVIDED BY PACKAGE x-y-z? This is a
job for dpkg: enter "dpkg -L <package-name>" at the command
prompt.  Try "dpkg -L netbase | pager" for example.

Also see http://newbieDoc.sourceForge.net/ ...