Promise FastTrack100 lite in FC5

[largomason]

I've got a Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus motherboard that has a builtin Promise FastTrack 100 "lite" PATA RAID controller on it. I've got 2x60 GB drives striped on the controller along with 2 other hard drives and 2 optical drives on the primary and secondary EIDE controllers. I installed FC5 to dual boot with windows xp and for some reason fedora sees each of the drives on the promise as separate 60GB drives with invalid partitioning tables on each of them.
Windows has always been able to read the data off the drives perfectly fine thru severl fresh reinstalls over the years, and this is the first time i've installed any flavor of linux on this box.

I've seen other posts about needing drivers for other Promise SATA cards, does Fedora still need drivers for a legacy IDE RAID card?

[phefner]

Yes. I ran into this problem as well, when I was installing a RAID card for my server. Fedora (actually all 2.6.x kernels do this, the 2.4.x doesn't) misidentifies the card as an IDE controller instead of a RAID. PATA RAID is all but dead on Linux, most of the distros only support RAID in SATA drives now. Hardware RAID controllers

I tried this with a RocketRAID 100 and a Promise FastTrak 100 RAID, and neither were recognized as one drive. You could use the Linux Software RAID, but it slows down the OS pretty good. I eventually just set everything up on one drive and ran a cron job backups to the other to maintain the data.

[LaKing]

I also have a fast track, but use the adaptec 1210 cards now.

Think on cheap raid cards as ide controllers. good raid begins where hardware is involved.
In Windows the driver emulates raid, and Windows uses Software raid too.

Raid 1 or Raid 0 is no problem, its not a processor intensive raid, .. raid 5 requires more power

U wont see your data under linux now, and u cant share software raid between win32 and Linux