[CentOS] Installing Centos 5 on HP DL140 G3

[Kai Schaetzl]

John wrote on Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:26:59 -0400:

> Check your BIOS Settings for the controller. May be that it needs to set
> to "Mass Storage" if available in the HP Bios.

There is nothing I can set regarding this. There is also a built-in HP SATA 
fakeRAID controller for the mainboard built-in SATA ports. I switched that off. 
I also switched SATA ports off now. There's nothing else in the BIOS I could 
try I think. There's also nothing in the controller's BIOS that seems to be 
fitting this description, the only hardware-related thing I can change there, 
is a hook interrupt or what they call it. I didn't dare to change that yet.

> > According to this readme page for the latest driver at
> > ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib2/software1/pubsw-linux/p1463703615/v44436/mpt
> > linux-4.00.13.01-2.rhel5.i686.dd.gz.txt
> > CentOS 5 should already contain a "default driver version contained in the
> > Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 installation CD"
> 
> Then again the MPT Drivers for that controller may have been dropped for
> that controller.

Well, I was going by their description which says that RHEL 5 comes with these 
drivers. Of course, that could still be wrong ...

I do know several have been "End of Lifed" I know this
> to be true for other high end server manufactures. Support for them
> ended in RHEL 4. So that would = CentOS 4 as well.

It seems that RHEL 4 did not have the drivers on board. Their software 
configuration guide mentions that you need to install a driver (if I recall 
right). Unfortunately, the guide wasn't updated for RHEL, although they say 
they support RHEL 5 and 5.1 on this machine.

Maybe I actually hit a different problem than I think. This is the first time 
that I need to install an extra driver for installation or use an external HBA 
SAS/SATA adapter. Some more information:

During inital anaconda setup I can see that various mpt drivers get installed. 
It's too fast output at this time to read well thru ALT F3/F4, but it looks 
like the controller and SATA drives are found and handled under /dev/sda with 
no error. The drivers loaded are mtpbase, mptscsih, mptsas and 
scsi_transport_sas.
After choosing eth0 as install source and retrieving the kickstart file setup 
asks me "unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation 
type. Would you like to manually select your driver or sue a driver disk". The 
"manual" selection gives me a list of storage drivers. 
I then tried to use the driver given by HP which is a dd file and install it 
from a USB stick. I can select /dev/sdb1 and it shows the .dd files as the only 
one available. When I choose this it tells me "no devices of the appropriate 
type were found on the driver disk". At the same time ALT+F4 shows "unable to 
identify CD-ROM format" and F3 a line "modules to insert" that is empty. The dd 
file is a 1.440 floppy image it seems. Am I doing something wrong here?

In case that matters: of course, I already set up the two drives in the LSI SAS 
utility for a RAID1 configuration and it shows them now as "LSILogicLogical 
Volume 3000" which seems to be quite ok to me.

I'd appreciate any insight you might have. I'm going to try out their forums 
now and see how good they are.

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
Get your web at Conactive Internet Services: http://www.conactive.com