(fake)raid problems with jaunty

[prad]

we have a supermicro 1.26G server with 4 scsi hd and a dac960 raid card
it's worked great on freebsd for about a year, but we want to switch to
ubuntu.

we can install jaunty without bootloader and separately install grub
(or lilo) and the booting fails, it seems because it can't find the raid
array. we've tried raid5, raid0+1, raid0.

the livecd doesn't boot. neither do other distribution installs such as
slackware, suse, fedora or even debian. we've tried the ubuntu server
version as well as the alternate cd. we've had no better luck with 8.04
either.

i find it peculiar that freebsd (7.0 and 7.1), works right away with
this, but so many linuxes don't even boot and ubuntu can't seem to
mount root.

thoughts on possible solutions:

1. figure out some way to disable the dac960 and use software raid. if
we disable in bios, clear config or pull the card, the harddrives aren't
picked up by the motherboard.

2. find a way to boot from something else ide, cdrom, even floppy and
try to transfer control to the raid drive setup.


-- 
In friendship,
prad

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