[CentOS] CentOS 5.5 does not recognise SAS drives with LSI 1068E Controller

Wed Mar 9 16:47:35 UTC 2011
Peter Peltonen <peter.peltonen at gmail.com>

Hi and thanks for your reply,

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 6:33 PM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
> Peter Peltonen wrote:
>> Based on that info I assume the board having a "8x SAS Ports via LSI
>> 1068E Controller". We received the server with 3 drives + 1 spare as
>> hw RAID-5 preinstalled. During bootup I see that the drives are
>> initialised and everything seems ok.
>>
>> The issue I am facing is that when trying to install CentOS no hard
>> drives are recognised.
> <snip>
> I recently had a problem like that with a Dell box. The trick is that with
> a hardware controller, it supercedes software RAID. What you need to do is
> go into the firmware controller configuration on boot, before you get to
> grub, and make sure everything's visible and correct. The controller can
> see the drives, but not present them to the o/s if you don't.

Hmm, I am not sure if I understand you correctly: are you saying that
in the firmware configuration there might be an option that makes the
disks invisible for the OS? This sounds a bit strange and I wonder
what such config could be...

Or are you suggesting that I should put the controller in "JBOD mode"
and then use software RAiD instead of hardware RAID? I would not like
to go with this option as I think the performance would suffer this
way?

Regards,
Peter