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February 4th, 2005 21:00

PE 750 w/ CERC SATA RAID, Fedora 3 install problem

Greetings all,

I am trying to install Fedora Core 3 onto two PowerEdge 750 machines with the Dell CERC SATA RAID Controller. After selecting the partition method (either Automatic or Manual) and then clicking on the next button the machine will lock up and emit a continuous tone until turned off.

Fedora Core 2 installs and operates just fine on both machines. At the same point during installation with Fedora Core 2 the tone is a very short beep, and then the installer moves on normally.

I believe the problem to be something with the aacraid drivers used in Fedora Core 3. I have tried to use the RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 aacraid drivers that Dell provides, but Fedora will not recognize the driver disk. (Yes I read the note about having to have an array in place.) I tried using the latest Adaptec aacraid drivers for RedHat, but these also did not work.

Gentoo installed just fine with the 2.6.10-gentoo-r6 kernel and the aacraid and ata_piix drivers included with the kernel compile.

I could not get Mandrake 10.1 to recognize the CD drive.

I am also waiting for Fedora Core 4 Test 1 to be released (Feb 21) to see what happens with that.

Anyone with any information about this please help. Or if you can tell me how to get the aacraid drivers out of Fedora Core 2 and put them on a driver disk Fedora Core 3 will actually use, that would probably work too.

Thanks in advance,

-Zamboni

P.S.: Yes, I know Fedora is not supported by Dell, but come on. It is pretty much the next version of RedHat with a different name and logo (but still free). RedHat said that themselves. So it really should be supported.

February 4th, 2005 23:00

Additional notes:

I have flashed the SATA controller with BIOS 7403 from Dell.

I have also flashed the system BIOS with build A03 for the PowerEdge 750.

25 Posts

February 7th, 2005 10:00

 
It's a problem in the later 2.6 kernels..

1 Message

February 22nd, 2005 19:00

Did you ever get this working Zamboni1138? I am having exactly the same trouble on a PE 750 RAID-1. I'm not sure how to fix this - can I select a custom driver at some point in the install process?

I'm installing from the Fedora ISOs on CD.

25 Posts

February 23rd, 2005 06:00

Well, it IS possible with Fedora 2 (not sure about 3) and the latest 2.6.10 kernel which you can upgrade after install.., but the array needs to be in OK state.., when it's rebuilding or verifying it'll hang on boot.., so it's a risk when a server hangs and you remotely need to reboot.


But it may be advisable to wait a few weeks for the official release drivers for RHEL4, since this is a 2.6.9 kernel too.. (been using the official RHEL3 drivers for the e1000 card)

February 23rd, 2005 17:00

No, I never got Fedora Core 3 installed on a Dell 750. As pointed out above by Wunk it appears to be an early 2.6.x kernel issue. No matter what drivers you use it probably will not work.

Yes you can tell the Fedora installer to use a driver disk. When you boot from the Fedora install CD you want to enter "linux dd" at the boot prompt. When it gets into the installer it will ask you if you have a driver disk and then it goes on from there. The problem with this is that the drivers from Dell for RHEL 3 are not recognized, nor are the drivers from Adaptec.

At this point I am waiting till Monday (Feb. 28th) for the release of Fedora Code 4 Test 1 and see what that does. Because that should be booting from the 2.6.9 or .10 kernel it will probably work.

The Gentoo 2004.3 CD boots fine with "gentoo-nofb nodhcp", you don't need the "doscsi" argument. The array shows up as /dev/sda. I used the 2.6.10-gentoo-r6 kernel via the gentoo-dev-sources, used genkernel --menuconfig and added the AACRAID and ATA_PIIX modules as builtin under low-level SCSI drivers. It booted fine and worked great.

March 16th, 2005 16:00

I just tried Fedora Core 4 Test 1 and it installed just fine. Unlike FC2 there wasn't even a short beep.

25 Posts

May 11th, 2005 09:00

Supposably there's a driver disk at:
http://linux.dell.com/files/aacraid/fc3/

But FC3 doesn't seem to load the driver on there and just use it's own one (which is broken, duh)..

I've booted the install with:
linux dd text
linux dd expert text
linux dd expert noprobe text

All to no avail, I can't seem to load the driver that's on the disk in any way..

Any ideas ?

25 Posts

May 11th, 2005 12:00

I've finally been able to load the driver.., but it STILL has issues when the controller is in build or verify state..

method:

boot FC3 from CD, at the lilo prompt issue:
linux dd noprobe text

When asked to use the driver disk, try and load it, it most likely won't work.
Manually load the Intel e1000 driver for NIC support
Now continue without selecting the aacraid driver, when it says: no harddisk found, want to select a driver ? Hit alt+f2 to get a working bash prompt

mount the floppy:
mkdir /mnt/floppy ; mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

Now we extract the driver on there to a seperate directory:
cd /tmp ; gzip -dc /mnt/floppy/modules.cgz | cpio -id

You'll now have a driver in /tmp/2.6.9-1.6667/i586/ named aacraid.ko
You can load it with: cd /tmp/2.6.9-1.6667/i586/ ; modprobe aacraid.ko

It all goes well UNTIL you get at the partitioning part.., where once again the array will bail out with the I/O error etc...

Bummer nevertheless
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