SLES10 SP1 and PERC2/SC

[Matt Domsch]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 10:58:02PM -0400, Chris Arnold wrote:
> I am having trouble installing SLES10 SP1 onto a Dell poweredge 4300
> server with a PERC2 RAID card. I have made all 6 drives into a RAID5 and
> initialized the logical drive. Then i boot off the SLES10 SP1 CD and and
> i get an error "no hard disks were found. Check hardware and try again".
> I was able to install SLES9 without any problems and any other OS will
> recognize the RAID5 drives. The BIOS of the PERC2 does not seem to be
> the problem. I can also abort the install and try to load the megaraid
> driver but this never works either.Why won't SLES10 SP1 recognize the
> logical drive?
> I have flashed the system BIOS and the RAID card firmware (it had
> 3.13 on it and now it is 3.00. I would like to put 3.13 back on the
> RAID card but do not see it on the dell support site). This sounds
> like a kernel module problem but i can not understand why SLES9 had
> the module and SLES10 does not. Anyway, if someone could point me to
> the correct suse/SLES10 drivers or tell me how to get SLES10 SP1
> onto this 4300, i would be greatly appreciative.

Remove the PERC2/SC card and attach the disks directly to the SCSI
controller.  It'll work much better.

The PERC2/SC card is no longer supported by anyone, and the driver for
it, megaraid_legacy, receives zero attention anymore, and thus most
likely isn't even built in most distributions.  That and the hardware
itself is slow; you'll get better results all around if you simply use
the onboard aic7xxx SCSI controller, and if you want, software RAID.

Thanks,
Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux