Proliant DL320G2 / RAID / RedHat Linux 8.0

[James Sefton]

Hi All,

I hope someone can help me here because i have been trying to figure this out for a good month now and im still 'dead in the water' with it.

I recently bought a bunch of DL320's (G2) with the intention of installing a RedHat 8 system on them and using the onboard RAID controller to mirror a pair of hard disks to give me some fault tolerance. I made an enquiry to HP before i bought the servers explaining exactly what i wanted to do and asked if the servers were suitable. i was later called back and assured that they are perfectly suitable for the job that i described so im guessing that i am simply doing something wrong.

My problem is that linux does not see a single raid drive as i usually see with other raid controllers. It actually shows me the 2 seperate hard disks that are installed (Disk Druid) and lets me set them up and use them as if they were just on a normal IDE bus.

I have setup a RAID1 array, attached the 2 drives to it and then initialised the array in the RAID bios.

What am i doing wrong? How do i get linux to see the RAID drive instead of the physical disks?

There is a jumper on the motherboard (J4000) that appears to be a switch between IDE/ATA and RAID. Chaning this jumper appears to have no effect.

Please help if you can. I am asking here as a last resort as i can find no mention of it anywhere else.

[James Sefton]

Just to update things.
I have tried doing what someone else did on here who was having the same problems.

I have installed Linux on the first drive and then installed HP's bunch of drivers that include the management drivers and the lsi megaraid drivers which i expected to solve the problem.

I then rebooted and let the megaraid bios rebuild the second disk.

The system booted back up but when i run something like 'fdisk -l' which lists off the drives and partitions for me, i still see the two physical disks.
In addition to this, while booting i saw numerous errors about duplicate mount points. (ie. /boot)

I assumed that there is a possibility that this is how it is meant to be so i thought i would simulate a drive failure to see if it is working. I switched off the server and disconnected the power to the first drive so that the system should be forced to boot from the second drive which i have just rebuilt.
the system does start to boot from the second drive but fails. I dont quite remember the message that it gave but it suggested passing init= to the kernal?

This goes a little over my head and i have no idea how to pass anything to the kernal but im guessing that since the idea of raid1 is that one drive 'mirrors' the other, this should not happen in the first place.

I am now back where i started and hoping that someone out there has a pointer for me that will result in a solution.
I am considering going out and buying a simple raid1 card (maybe a promise one) that has a boot rom and hoping i can get it to work with the hardware that i already have. (ie. the dl320)

[James Sefton]

Just for anyone else who runs into this problem. I do appear to have found a solution.

LSI have a driver disk for the ATA133 Raid card.
This driver disk appears to work fine (i have installed it on 3 DL320's in the last few hours)

i downloaded it from:
http://support.megaraid.com/support/dlverify.cfm?DLFile=support/dlcenter/504f.tgz&InpDrvID=250

After downloading i followed the instructions for extracting it and then i install redhat 8 in text mode with the driver disk option. (ie. text dd )
The text mode part of things is just my preference and probably doesnt make any difference.

After loading the drivers from the floppy that i created, disk druid see's a single drive of the expected size. It installs onto it with no problem and so far everything appears fine.

Hope this saves someone a headache.

[Stoney A Seawell]

You have saved me a Headache! Thank You very much for reposting the solution. I have been working on the same thing with the exact same setup for 1 week. It works like a champ!
Thanks

[Robert Garcia_3]

THANK YOU!!! I have been banging my head against the wall for the past week with the IDENTICAL problem. You have saved my life!

[Lee Redmayne]

Does anyone happen to have an updated link since it appears the link no longer works.

And I can still confirm on a brand new DL320, J4000 still doesn't work!