After many years i just decided to give this damn onboard FakeRAID Promise FastTrack133 (pdc20278) another try. I nearly forgot about this peace of crap inside one of my machines, but as the harddisk inside is in pre-fail status and i just bought a new one, i thought it could be worth a try for a trivial RAID level 1 setup.
To shorten this story: It’s a mess, but finally i made it work. The magic word here is “dmraid”. It detects and activates the setup Arrays via /dev/mapper/*. Eventhough the system is to new (Kernel 2.6.X) for the binary-crap drivers from promise and to old for automatic setup (as in OpenSuSE 10.2), it is even doable on a now quite outdated SuSE 10.0 . The descriptions from howtoforge were quite valueable (eventough not that profound everywhere).
Perhaps i’ll manage to give a own short howto for it here soon. The keypoints are: you need the modules dm-mod, dm-mirror and pdc202xx_new in your initrd; next your mkinitrd needs to be extended to include dmraid into the initrd. Cloning of the data to the new disk can be done via the BIOS setup tool.