[Centos] CentOS 3.3 and High Point Raid Cards

[Lamar Owen]

On Sunday 09 January 2005 22:59, Ho Chaw Ming wrote:
> Anyone have experience using Hight Point Rocketraid 464 on a CentOs 3.3
> system? High Point drivers seem to only support a really outdated kernel
> version and I am having problems getting the system to recognise the raid
> card (and thus the whole raid).

According to High Point's website, it's an HPT374 chip.

See http://www.gulu.net/krd/hpt_rocketraid404_linux.html for some information.  
The links referenced are incorrect; go to 
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/bios_rr464.htm for the drivers.  Linux 
drivers, a GUI and a CLI RAID manager are available for download.  Red Hat 
7.2 is listed as supported; RHEL3/CentOS is based on this dist, so the 
drivers should work.

From what I can see, the HPT374 drivers are available in source form; see 
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/BIOS%20%2B%20Driver/hpt374/Linux/hpt374-opensource-v2.12.tgz 
for them.

And be sure to note the following note in the included readme.txt:
     If the kernel contains built-in IDE support for HPT374 controller,
     you must disable the kernel support before using this driver. You can
     either rebuild a kernel without HPT374 support, or use boot parameters
     like "hdx=noprobe" to disable the built-in driver.

There is a proprietary binary-only 'raid.o' module used in the opensource 
drivers; this probably is just a higher-performance software raid.  Standard 
Linux software RAID works fine with HighPoint chips; I am in fact using a 
motherboard with an HPT370 controller on board, but I'm not using the RAID 
features.  The box is running the ScientificLinux version of the RHEL3 kernel 
and it Just Works.  I can provide a dmesg excerpt if you'd like.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu