Problems with a RAID array on a Dell PE1850

[Ian P. Christian]

I'm having an odd problems with a poweredge 1850, and it's driving me mad - 
google's not helped me, and I've run out of places to look.

Basically, I can't use fdisk on /dev/sda.  I can however boot off this array, 
and everything is working fine - I'm having no issues using thie array for 
anything else.

# fdisk -l
Unable to seek on /dev/sda

# sfdisk /dev/sda --no-reread
Disk /dev/sda: 35669 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
llseek: Bad file descriptor

sfdisk: seek error on /dev/sda - cannot seek to 0
 /dev/sda: unrecognized partition table type
Old situation:
No partitions found

The odd thing is, if I boot off a gentoo liveCD, everything's ok.  

I've tried various kernel versions of the 2.6 series. 
I've tried using config's found on google.
I've tried configuing a kernel from scratch countless times.
I've tried repartitioning and reinstalling from scratch.
I've tried shouting at it.

extra info:
 # zcat /proc/config.gz  | grep MEG
CONFIG_MEGARAID_NEWGEN=y
CONFIG_MEGARAID_MM=y
CONFIG_MEGARAID_MAILBOX=y
# CONFIG_MEGARAID_LEGACY is not set
# CONFIG_MEGARAID_SAS is not set

 # lspci | grep RAID
02:0e.0 RAID bus controller: Dell PowerEdge Expandable RAID controller 4 (rev 
06)

On a seperate note, anyone know how to upgrade firmware using Dell's software 
on a non-RH system?

# ./RAID_FRMW_LX_R107404.BIN
/root
which: no lockfile in 
(/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.3.6)
spsetup.sh: Cannot find utilities on the system to execute package.
Make sure the following utilities are in the path: sed lockfile tail rm mkdir 
chmod ls basename
/root

'lockfile' is missing - whatever that is!

Kind Regards,

-- 
Ian P. Christian ~ http://pookey.co.uk
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