Debian GNU/Linux on Dell Poweredge 2950 with PERC 5/i RAID

[Andrew Moise]

On Thu Sep 28 2006, Jason Martens <jmartens at cityofevanston.org> wrote:
> I'm working on installing Debian on a 2950 right now.  So far, the etch
> beta 3 installer detects the disks, but after I reboot into the new
> system, the initrd can't detect the raid controller.  The installed
> kernel is 2.6.16.  I need the megaraid_mbox driver right? When did that
> get added to the kernel.org kernels?

  I believe that what you want is the megaraid_sas driver.  It's
actually in the 2.6.16 kernel, but there's a bug in the etch beta 3
installer that stops it being installed into the initrd (see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=384437 for a
description and a workaround).  I'm also installing Debian on a 2950
right now; what worked well for me was the updated (and, of course,
unsupported!) unofficial sarge installer at
http://kmuto.jp/b.cgi/debian/d-i-2616.htm .
  I've got a working sarge system now (with a backported 2.6.16
kernel), but I'm getting occasional SCSI errors under heavy write load
-- I plan to write a separate post about that once I investigate a bit
more.