Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus controllers

dosboss

New Member
I have tried several routes, several versions of dban including the current beta, and the Promise Sata150 controllers will not work (I have two). They are detected by the kernel, but they say no drives are attached. When you more /proc/scsi/sata_promise/0, 1, 2, and 3 (both controllers in) the reply is "This driver does not support the proc filesystem".

Can anything be done? I have tried recompiling the kernel for dban several times with no luck.
 
No, Promise has been slow to release good drivers. Your best choice would be to move the disks to another computer for wiping.
 
Drat. I was hoping to make a mass wipe machine, as all our drives are in removeable caddies. I could have put 7 in one machine (using the 40-pin IDE connectors on the Promise), wiped, and done 7 more when they finished (probably 3 days later... :)). I don't have budget at work even for a 15-dollar used IDE card (or the red tape would take months to get them), and these Promise units were scavenged at that. 3 or 4 (if I boot from diskette) could be done at a time on the on-board controllers I guess.

Is there hope that the 2.6 kernel will do a better job of it? And are you moving to the 2.6 kernel anytime soon? I don't care if I have to boot from CD (machine is incapable of booting from USB), or if the kernel has to be modified in some way that may not be GPL-happy, I just want it to work. I'm one of those people that has to see something through or it bugs you for 6 months afterward.

Hmm... I wonder if *BSD has good support for these cards? :)

dosboss
 
This is great, I wish I knew that SATA support was available sooner.

Great product, keep up the good work.
 
DBAN has most of the SATA drivers from the Linux 2.6 kernel, btw.

The innards of the Linux 2.4 kernel are stable and reliable. DBAN will likely stay with Linux 2.4 so long as drivers for current hardware are being backported from the Linux 2.6 branch.

There is a possibility that DBAN 1.1.x will go to Linux 2.6 to get some hot-swapping goodness, though.
 
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