PowerEdge 1650 / CentOS Installation / RAID Problem

[Paul M. Dyer]

Hi Aaron,

I have used the Silicon Image cards to add more storage to commodity built systems.

desc: "Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller"

In particular, I gave up on using the hardware raid, in favor of using software raid.   I found that the hardware raid driver would be recognized on boot, but fail to mount the device later.

I use the Sata Sil drives for database and osbackup storage.   I have other drives for the OS install.   That worked out well.   It is stable and has been running okay for about 1 year.

Paul

----- Original Message -----
From: "Aaron Greenspan" <aarong at thinkcomputer.com>
To: linux-poweredge at dell.com
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 3:05:41 AM (GMT-0600) America/Chicago
Subject: PowerEdge 1650 / CentOS Installation / RAID Problem

Hi,

I thought I would get creative by putting a generic PCI SATA RAID
controller in a PowerEdge 1650 and installing CentOS. Unfortunately,
I've tried all day, and I can't get CentOS to install.

The controller card I chose is based on the Silicon Image 3114RAID
chipset, and I have two Western Digital 250GB SATA hard drives hooked up
to the first two internal ports on the card. Both drives are recognized 
perfectly when the server boots, and the server and RAID controller have 
both been updated to the latest versions of their respective BIOSes (A11 
and 5.4.0.3).

For much of the day, the CentOS installation program (anaconda) would
simply stop working at random, unpredictable points and report a
kernel panic. The kernel would even panic sometimes after I pressed
Control+Alt+Delete in the few seconds before the system was about to 
restart. Eventually, hoping to narrow down the cause of the problems, I
completely disabled the on-board Adaptec 79xx SCSI adapter, which I
think was probably causing an IRQ conflict with the SATA RAID controller 
and/or second network card, according to the system BIOS.

Once the SCSI card was disabled, there were definitely fewer (but not
zero) kernel panics, but I still cannot get the installation program to
actually get to the point where it copies files. Instead, if it gets to
the point where it should start copying things--and it often didn't even
get to that point because of some sort of bug involving the on-board ATI
Rage XL chipset (see http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1308)--it fails
on the first file, and then when anaconda quits the errors reveal that
somehow the filesystem, whether I'm using software RAID or hardware
RAID, has been mounted as read-only.

When the kernel panics, the Scroll Lock and Num Lock lights on the 
keyboard blink and the system freezes. The amber light on the front of 
the server also blinks, implying that there is a new BMC error, but I 
have yet to figure out how to actually read those error logs when I 
can't even get the system to boot properly. I've been searching the Dell 
site for an ISO that will let me run some kind of bootable OpenManage 
System Console, but I have yet to find the right one. (If anyone at Dell 
is reading, your driver download site is horrible.)

I'm not sure if the sil_sata driver that ships with CentOS is causing my 
problem due to some sort of flaw. The card I purchased came with its own 
drivers for RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.1, but getting CentOS to recognize 
a driver disk was torture, and even when it did recognize the driver 
disk, CentOS claimed the card wasn't installed. So, the problem may be 
the generic Silicon Image SATA driver, but I can't figure out how to 
replace it with a better one.

Lastly, I don't think it's bad hardware--I've tried this on two 
different but identical PowerEdge 1650 servers with two different but 
identical SiI 3114RAID controllers and four identical 250GB SATA hard 
drives. I get the exact same results on both machines.

Anyone have any clue as to why this may be happening? Any help would be
appreciated.

Aaron

Aaron Greenspan
President & CEO
Think Computer Corporation

http://www.thinkcomputer.com

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