We're sorry. If you've been following along at home, and bought two large Western Digital hard drives, you'll notice this didn't work. For some reason Promise controllers working under Linux don't play nicely with Western Digital drives over 40 GB, and refuse to recognize the BIOS-defined RAID partitions. The cause of this is unknown to us. However, the particular drives that we were working with are fast and have three year warranties. So, to make use of these drives we'll install Debian with software RAID support.
Stuff you'll need:
go get lar1440.bin from http://people.debian.org/~blade/install/lvm/
And one more floppy disk.
Build a kernel with all of the software RAID options built as modules, and IDE-RAID support removed.
gzip -d < lar1440.bin > image.bin
mount -o loop image.bin /mnt
cd /mnt
mkdir -p lib/modules/2.4.22/kernel/drivers/md/
cp <linux-src-directory>/drivers/md/*.o lib/modules/2.4.22/kernel/drivers/md/
umount /mnt
create a new blank image:
dd if=/dev/zero of=lar1440v1.bin bs=1k count=1440
compress our expanded lvm and raid tools disk into a floppy size image:
gzip -9 < image.bin | dd of=lar1440v1.bin conv=notrunc
Time to format a new floppy!
fdformat /dev/fd0
write it out:
dd if=lar1440v1.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024
You now have a disk that contains LVM &: RAID tools, supporting kernel 2.4.22!
Now it's time to follow some instructions from: http://people.debian.org/~blade/install on how to use this handy extra modules disk.