[plug] Help request

[Denis Brown]

Hello Jon and list members,

On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Jon  Miller wrote:

> Got everything to work.
>
Good news and thanks for the "recipe."  One thing I picked up on is that
you used a boot hard disk, presummably IDE connected since they'd be
pretty much guaranteed to be recognised as an install target drive by the
distros.   Readers may recall that I faced a similar challenge back in mid
January and with great help from this list, managed to get things sorted
out without recourse to a temporary hard drive.

The basic recipe I used (with acknowledged help!) was:
1) set up the RAID controller, drives and array.  In my case it was an IBM
server with ServeRAID controller.   Fired up the ServeRAID utilities
(Linux-based, by the way) and configured and formatted the array.

2) Compiled a kernel (on another Linux machine) containing the appropriate
ServerRAID drivers and other IBM-hardware-specific drivers.   My chosen
distro was Debian.

3) Created a Debian "boot floppies" installation CD - here was where I
needed the help! - incorporating that custom kernel.

4) Installed from the customised boot floppies CD straight onto the RAID
array.   One of the installation steps was a cfdisk so I could not forget
to do that!

Hope this helps others in future.  Should apply to other distros.  The
secret being to make and use that custom kernel, it seems.

Cheers,
Denis