Perc 5/i+linux

Question

Hi,   Just took delivery of a Dell Power edge 1950 with 2 dual cores 3.0ghz and 4GB.  The server was purchased to run ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS with xen.  I found that the processors didn't have the VT enabled in the bios.  The other issue I am facing is that when installing ubuntu it see 3 drives?  I have 2 146GB drive running raid 1 according to the Perc raid controller.  I was told when I purchased the the server that it would be running hardware raid 1.  Please can someone explain to me if this is the case how can I see 3 drives 2 physical and 1 logical drive in the ubuntu partition manager.  This also causes a problem once ubuntu is installed as GRUB will not load  ...you recieve an Error 21.   Please can someone advise me if Perc 5/i is hardware raid or software raid.   Regards Mark

Dev Mgr · Answer

Software raid is defined as raid handled by the OS.

Therefor, assuming you didn't set up a raid 1 yourself in Ubuntu, you're running hardware (has dedinated processor for the raid controller) or firmware raid (depends on your system processor to do the calculations for the raid). Dell doesn't offer any firmware raid options on Poweredge servers from what I've seen, so this leaves hardware raid.

However, it's possible that your drives have been set up in multiple raid containers to provide the OS multiple seperated virtual disks.

I'd go into the PERC bios and see what it has defined.

Keep in mind that Dell only has certified RHEL 4 (and 3 probably) and SLES 9 and 10. This doesn't mean your OS won't work, but you may need to check LSI's site or so to find drivers for your OS for it to handle the PERC cards properly.

mambotech · Answer

Hi,   Thanks for the repsonse. The server came built with Raid 1  ...I have looked at the raid config tool and it shows the 2 drives as 1 logical drive.  The problem that I am having, is that when installing ubuntu the disk partition tool see's 3 drive's sda, sdb and sdc  sda and sdb are the 2 physical drives and sdc is the raid controller it's self.  Is it possible that the install tool is not driving the controller correctly or is this still possibley a raid configuration issue.  When I installed the OS I used sdc to patition the logical drive and install the base os.  What I noticed was that when grub installed it selected sda.  There is a fix that I ran that loaded the megaraid_sas as an initramfs which of course when this boots drives the raid controller and only shows one drive.  It seems that this drive is different from what grub is looking for and we get the error 21.  I have one more thing the try which is to partition the sda drive and then install the base OS to this drive.  I will let you no if this works.      Thanks for you asistance.   Mark Message Edited by mambotech on 10-02-2006 06:17 AM

Avian00 · Answer

Hello,

I am having this same issue myself. However, I have determined that Ubuntu Server seems to be the only (or one of just a few) distributions that is affected by this problem. Despite the fact that I am CERTAIN that the two drives in my server are configured in a HARDWARE RAID 1 in the RAID-Controller's BIOS, I am seeing THREE disks in my partitioner in Ubunus: the 2 physical disks and the 1 RAID'ed disk. Has anybody arrived at a solution to this problem?

Matt

Avian00 · Answer

Thanks for the response! That's great to know! I am, however, still a bit disappointed. I was really excited about 6.06 for its Long-Term-Support. Since I encountered this problem, I've done some research and testing, and I think I'm going to settle on CentOS, since it is a Binary Equivolent of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which is officially supported by Dell). Perhaps in the future I can consider Ubuntu again. I really love that distribution!

Speeder2k · Answer

ubuntu 6.10 (released today) fixes the problem. It is/was a kernel issue.

PowerEdge OS Forum

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