Installing Dell 6Gbps SAS HBA and driver mpt2sas on PE2950 running CentOS 5.5

Hi,

I have installed a Dell 6Gbps SAS HBA into a PowerEdge 2950 running CentOS 5.5 32-bit. I will use this HBA to connect to an MD3200.

I have used the DVD supplied with MD3200 and ran into problems. At the end of the installation, I have rebooted the server. After the reboot, the server was unable to mount /dev/sdb1, which is a RAID5 volume powered by the internal Perc6i HBA.

"fdisk -l /dev/sdb" shows the unique partition /dev/sdb1, but mount cannot mount it, returning an error (device busy or does not exist).

After talking to Dell Support, I'm using CentOS instead of RHEL, so I must do more on my side ;-) In addition, even if I would use RHEL 5.5, it seems that this problem is not a known issue.

Then, I looked at the downloads and found some updates to support RHEL 5.5, including driver mpt2sas and MD3200 DVD.

I downloaded both and started the installation.

I installed R266975-mpt2sas-02.00.03.00-1.tar.gz (for Dell 6Gbps SAS HBA on RHEL 5.5), which contains  mpt2sas driver version 02.00.03.00. The installation runs smoothly. After installing this driver, I think I will fall into the same issue than previously, with system not able to mount /dev/sdb1.

Here is my thought: /etc/modprobe.conf is not correctly modified.

[root@stone ~]# cat /etc/modprobe.conf

alias eth0 bnx2

alias eth1 bnx2

alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid_sas

alias scsi_hostadapter1 ata_piix

alias scsi_hostadapter2 qla2xxx

alias scsi_hostadapter3 usb-storage

alias scsi_hostadapter mpt2sas

# Begin Dell MD Modification

options scsi_dh_rdac blacklist="DELL:MD3000,DELL:MD3000i"

# End Dell MD Modification