I installed the original FC2 release with disks on a 9500-8 as the only hard drives after building the driver from 3ware myself. It was a bit tricky, but not impossible (seeing as how I had no idea what I was doing at the time). Somewhere along the way in the install process you have an opportunity to get to a shell prompt (perhaps this was in another console??--I don't recall). In anticipation of this, I pre-built the driver I needed against the boot kernel (well, my good friend Eric did nearly all of this work) on another system. As I recall, the boot kernels were built for 386?? (at any rate, they weren't what I expected). I put the driver I needed on a floppy, so I could switch to a console with a shell prompt during the FC2 install, mount the floppy, and insmod the driver. Now, I could install, but still had to get the system to self-boot. I googled for information about how to patch an initrd image--somewhere (probably at redhat.com), I found information on how to uncompress and mount an initrd image as a filesystem, allowing me to put my new driver in (once mounted, you merely have to copy the driver to the right place and edit a file to force it to be probed--use the 3w-xxxx driver as a model). I also put a 686 version of the driver in /lib/modules/2.6.XXXX/kernel/drivers/scsi Once 2.6.8 came out, I anticipated I could just up2date it and be done with it, however, that didn't work--likely because the 9500 wasn't detected by FC2 at install time, /etc/modprobe.conf didn't mention it, which seems to be necessary for a kernel upgrade to fix this up. Sorry to be short on detail, how I did this is pretty fuzzy in my head (as you can tell from the above). If you start with the 2.6.8 kernel, you should be able to save several steps from this process--building the 3ware supplied driver really was the most complicated part, which you can possibly avoid entirely. I can try to resurrect more details if a more knowledgeable person doesn't respond better than I. -se -----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jason L Tibbitts III Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 12:14 PM To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Installing FC2 on a 3ware 9000-series card? I have some new servers with all of their disk on 3w-9500S-4LP cards. I know that the original FC2 releases predate support for this card, but the current update kernels include the driver. Unfortunately that means the boot kernels don't see it; they try to load the 3w-xxxx driver instead of the 3w-9xxx and the card is not found. The trick of booting the FC3test images and using them to install the FC2 packages doesn't work. (I've used this in the past to install onto hardware the FC2 boot images can't handle.) Has anyone successfully installed FC2 onto a 3ware 9000-series card? I fear I'm in for a lesson in hacking new boot images. - J< -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
