DL380 G4, Smart Array 6i and Red Hat 3.0 not playing well

[Dave Wherry]

We are trying to load Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0 on a DL380 Gen 4 with a Smart Array 6i controller.
During the Power On Self Test (POST) the system recognizes the 6i controller and the logical disk which we had previously created.
The Red hat installation program is not recognizing the disk drives and therefore has no place to install the operating system to.
During the installation we are able to use the array configuration utility and list, delete and create a Raid-5 logical disk using the 6i controller and the 4 hard drives in the server. The controller and drives are working. The installation program just does not see the logical drive.
During the installation we see the cciss driver attempt to, and apparently sucessfully load. This should enable Red Hat to see the logical drive. It does not.
I downloaded a new driver from the HP support site and have tried to load that driver. It does not load.

As an experiment I put the 4 hard drives in a DL380 Gen 3 with a Smart Array 5i controller.
The installation program recognizes the logical drive that was created on the Gen 4 system and successfully loads the operating system.

I put the hard drives back in the Gen 4 system and tried to boot. I expected there may be some conflicts.
The system had a kernel panic and will not boot.
It seems the problem lies in an incompatibility between the 6i controller and the Red Hat 3.0 installation program.

Checking on HP's web site I see that this same configuration (DL380 Gen 4, 6i & RH3.0) can be ordered. This leads me to believe it is a supported configuration.

There have been a couple of similar scenarios posted recently but, none have shown a resolution. Does any one have any ideas?

Thanks.

[Ryan Lee]

I suggest download RHEL 3.0 update 3 for OS installation. it may updated cciss driver for 6i.

[HGN]

Hi

The drive on the HP website can be used during install, need to specify the option so that during the install it will prompt you for the driver disk. I think when we had an issue with 2.1 HP recommended us to use update 2 which would only work with the driver to sense the disks ( update 1 or update 4 would not sense the disks) please look into HP suggestion which update release to use to make the array sense the disks.

Hope this helps

Rgds

Gopi

[Dave Wherry]

Ryan,
Good suggestion because the one common element is the installation CDs. However, we can not download from Red Hat until we register the installation and we can not register until we have the OS installed. Catch 22.

Gopi,
Could you give some more information on how to use the drive on the HP website? We have never attempted something like that.

Thank you both.

[Steven E. Protter]

It is possible to register without a system installed. You may need to actually call Red Hat. The number is on the media purchase site.

I don't however think that this is a red hat issue. Each HP server class machine has a unique disk setup. Prior to installing red hat it is necessary to get a bootable setup cd(it can be downloaded). You boot off the cd and set up your disk.

Now you can safely do an installation of Red Hat with some chance of success.

Reading through your information proves the disks themselves are probably good. The disk array controller, built into the server may be a problem and could require a hardware call to fix.

SEP

[Matt Palmer_2]

there is a boot time parameter that needs to be passed to the kernel I think, because I had this problem with SuSE SLES 8 And DL380 with 6i, and it would not recognise the drives. there is an update which is included for cciss, but I additionally had to pass acpi=oldboot to the kernel. I realise you are on RH, but thought that you might need to make similar changes to the kernel on your installation.


hope this helps

regards

Matt

[Dave Wherry]

We have resolved the problem.

One of our lab guys had created a login on Red Hat's site last week but, could not access any downloads. I did the same and could not access any downloads.

Today, he went on and was able (we're not sure why) to download ISO Update 3 and that is working just fine. The server is loading now.

Steven, since we were able to create, list, delete and recreate the logical disk it did not appear to be the controller. Allowing that it could have just been fooling us, when we moved the physical disks to the DL380 G3 and it saw the logical disk that verfied that the controller was working.

It turned out to just be the installation CDs.

Thanks to all for your help and suggestions.

[Dave Wherry]

Thanks.