Lukav's Weblog

Over the year I had to compile and install several times hpt374 driver for the HighPoint IDE controller.

Although the hardware is very old and probably nobody use it anymore I decide to put down this howto, for anyone interested.

The last time we’ve upgraded debian to etch with kernel 2.6.18-6-686 so the instruction will assume this kernel version.

First install the kernel-headers package

apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.18-6-686

then download the driver in this case hpt374-opensource-v2.17-1114
extract to some folder, for example: /usr/src/hpt374-2.6.18-6-686/

compile the driver

make KERNELDIR=/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-6-686

you should now have hpt374.ko. Copy this file in the kernel modules directory

cp hpt374.ko /lib/modules/2.6.18-6-686/kernel/drivers/ide/pci/

We need to populate the modules dependencies

depmod -r 2.6.18-6-686

add hpt374 to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules if it is not already there

echo hpt374 >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

update the initrd image so the module gets loaded on system start up

update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.18-6-686

And thats it. You should now be able to reboot and use the new kernel with the raid

P.S. I’ve wrote this in a hurry, so I’ve may missed something.