[PLUG] Anyone Install Gentoo on an Asus KV8-MAX w/SATA Raid?

["Kyle R. Burton" <kyle.burton@gmail.com>]

I bought a new system.  First one in 4+years - thanks in large part to
Linux being usable on older hardware.  Anyway...I've got an amd64
3000, an Asus KV8-MAX MB with an on board SATA raid controller.  Its
got 2 160gb WD SATA Hdds that I've set up as RAID0 to look like a
single 300Gb partition.  I got WinXP to install on a 100Gb partition
by loading the raid drivers off of a floppy (had to install the floppy
for WinXP).

The Gentoo 2004.2 amd64 Live CD boots just fine.  The SATA Raid device
shows up in lspci's output and in dmesg's log.  I've googled and some
people have managed to get Gentoo installed under this configuration,
so I'm pretty certain that it'll work.  Most of the explanations talk
about using a PATA (parallel ata external disk drive?) drive,
installing a base system onto that, building a kernel with the proper
support for the raid driver and then using that to bootstrap the
install to the SATA Raid array.

I am going to try building the raid driver as a module (on another
system), putting it on a floppy, booting off of the Live CD and trying
to insmod it just to see if it'll recognize the array.

Trying to build a custom Live CD seems like a PITA considering how
long it'd take to unpack the iso, build a new kernel under it, then
repack/re-burn the iso to a cd to try booting off of it.  Mistakes
might be costly in time using that approach.

Something else I had though of was using an external USB HDD (or usb
CF keyfob) and doing an initial gentoo install to it, using it to
bootstrap onto the raid array.  Does anyone have any experience
booting from these kinds of devices (external usb hdd or usb cf
storage)?

Has anyone done an install on this kind of configuration?  What were
your experiences?


Thanks in advance.

Kyle R. Burton

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kyle.burton@gmail.com                           
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