Joel Jaeggli wrote:
On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, John Rowan wrote:
When I boot the system it displays
Phoenix - Award BIOS V6.00PG
SuperMicro P4SCA/P4SCE BIOS 1.3A
yeah it's a p4sca or p4sce, thats consistent with everything else.
On the bottom of the initial screen on left side it says
4/14/2005 - Canterwood - 6A79BSX9C-00
canterwood is intel 7210 chipset.
Pressing CTRL-I brings up the screen to configure the level of RAID
(0 or 1)
On top of that screen it says Intel RAID for Serial ATA V3.5.0.3003
The front of the case says SuperMicro but on the top (slide off)
cover it says Visionman. I've been to both SuperMicro.com and
Visionman.com web sites but neither has a Linux driver for Intel.
They have drivers they say are for RH 9 with specific kernel versions
but neither of those work. I don't understand why the Fedora Core 4
installation (which recognized the RAID controller and loaded the
correct driver) failed to boot after it said the installation was
complete.
Are you raiding the disks in the bios? If you are you shouldn't do
that, it's a software raid controller. Rather you use linux software
raid for that purpose.
Fedora core 4 does recognize the ich5r as a sata controller, but not
as a raid controller, so your the bios is probably pointing at a raid
device that doesn't really exist without some driver glue.
I'm in the process of installing FC4 for the fifth time now to see
if there is some way to salvage this hardware.
I've got a couple p4sci's out in the field running fc3, the only reall
difference between those and these is 64 bit pci slots.
It's looking more and more like I'll be getting an RMA from
TigerDirect.com for this one.
Holly crap Batman, I think you've hit it. Ironically I had just deleted
the RAID definition leaving the drives as non RAID devices. I booted to
try an installation of SuSE Pro 9.1 again. I was very surprised that
after deleting the RAID definition Fedora Core 4 booted from the disk
drive!!!! But it is hanging now after
Enabling Swap Space [ OK ]
I don't see any disk drive lights but placing my hand on the case I can
feel vibrations like there is quite a bit of disk drive activity.
I CTRL-ALT-F8 to get to the graphical window and saw it was trying
(unsuccessfully) to obtain an IP address from the DHCP server. I booted
with the CD into rescue mode and changed from BOOTPROTO=DHCP to none
then configured an IP address. Now the machine boots okay.
Okay, now that it is booting with NON RAIDed drives (two), that leaves
me with a problem in that the server is for Raining Data's Pick
application which requires RAW partitions. If it's not hardware RAID
and I have to rely on Linux's software RAID then Linux won't be
mirroring the RAW partition on which Pick stores it's data.
I know this problem is specific to Raining Data's app but suggestions
from this group on how to protect the RAW partition since I can't use
the Intel software RAID would be welcome.
Last question though, why is the Intel RAID for Serial ATA which appears
during POST considered software RAID? I would think this to be hardware
RAID.
