I am using RH 7.0 (Genisus) w/ original kernel. I added a promise ATA 100 controller that came with my new WD 160 gig drive. The machine doesn't seem to recognize it. I plan on accessing the drive through samba as I currently do with another drive.

My questions are:
What is the quickest and easiest way to upgrade the kernel? (if I have to in order to get it to see the promise card)
Do I have to compile my own?
Or can I use the RH rpm's w/o getting a dependancy nightmare?

How do I access the drive once I get the kernel upgraded? (or another way what hd will it be? i.e. hda, hdb, hde....)

Thanks in Advance.

I have a secondary controller card that uses the Promise ATA 100 chipset. Since Linux deals with chipsets and not cards then my configuration is identical to yours.

The support for this chipset was developed over time and the earlier kernels had buggy support. I suggest that you download the latest kernel from www.kernel.org and compile it.

" Or can I use the RH rpm's w/o getting a dependancy nightmare?"

I don't know. In general, you can run newer kernels on older distributions but I have never tried a gap this large.

"How do I access the drive once I get the kernel upgraded? (or another way what hd will it be? i.e. hda, hdb, hde....)"

The secondary contoller will have addresses of:
/dev/hde
/dev/hdf
/dev/hdg
/dev/hdh

"The machine doesn't seem to recognize it. "

The secondary BIOS on the controller card has to be recognized as an extension to the motherboard BIOS. Check your motherboard support web site or your BIOS support web site to see if tweaking is possible.