SLES10 SP1 and PERC2/SC

[Chris Arnold]

Matt Domsch wrote:
> 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.
This was the 2nd thing i did and i get a 'failure to initialize
catalogs" every time when connected to the on-board SCSI and the 6
hot-swap drives. I have tried a separate SCSI card all together and
still receive this error. I have even burnt new CD's thinking something
was wrong with the distro discs but i got that same error with new discs.