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Load RAID Driver During Install
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The Adaptec PCI Ultra 160 Single Channel RAID Controller, also known
as the Adaptec 2100s, was an interesting challenge as drivers for this
were not available on the install media. Thus initially it was not
possible to install Linux. The initial boot with Debian GNU/Linx
V2.2r2 CD-ROM failed because the disks were not found!
After the Configure Keyboard step in the Debian install process there
is an opportunity to Preload Essential Modules from Floppy. This
allows the loading of modules that are required for particular devices
that are otherwise not provided in the kernel.
So the first attempt at installing Linux obtained the appropriate
module/driver from Adaptec by downloading dptdriver-2.4.tgz
from linux.adaptec.com. This gzipped tape archive generates
/usr/adaptec/i2o_driver/:
$ tar zxvf dptdriver-2.4.tgz
$ cd usr/adaptec/i2o_driver/
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The drivers for various versions of the kernel are then contained in
dpt_i2o_prebuilt.cgz. This is a gzipped cpio archive. To extract the
archive:
$ mkdir tmp
$ cd tmp
$ gunzip < ../dpt_i2o_prebuilt.cgz | cpio --extract
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The kernel installed was 2.2.18pre21 but there is not a corresponding
dpt_i2o. The 2.2.18 version had undefined symbols and the machine
froze. The 2.2.19 version worked. This was then copied onto a floppy
for Debian to load:
$ mount /floppy
$ mkdir /floppy/boot
$ cp dpt_i2o.2.2.19 /floppy/boot/dpt_i2o.o
$ umount /floppy
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Once dpt_i2o is installed you can create and initialise the
disk partitions on the RAID:
# cfdisk /dev/sda (to create a single partition perhaps)
# mke2fs /dev/sda1
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Later when configuring drivers and devices you can also add modules
from floppy, but they must now be in
/floppy/lib/modules/scsi/dpt_i2o.o, for example.
Now we come unstuck because we create a boot floppy yet there is no
way to install the RAID driver on the kernel on this boot floppy, so
next reboot the RAID is no longer available and the boot hangs with a
Kernel Panic and a message about block-major-8 and not being able to
mount the root fs.
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