Found the problem. For some reason, JBOD drives won't be recognized by Linux when the card is set up to enable RAID, even with no RAID devices defined.
Another weird thing: this system has a "keyboard controller frequency" setting and the USB keyboard won't be recognized by Linux when it's not set to 6 Mhz. (who woulda thunk?)
Posted for posterity...
-Ben
On Saturday 12 September 2009 12:42:00 Benjamin Smith wrote:
I'm trying to install CentOS 4 on a new Supermicro 1U system with an Adaptec 9410 SAS controller. I'm not interested in RAID or anything, just want to install bare on the drive.
But while the installer "sees" the Adaptec controller well enough to load "Adaptec 94xx" drivers, the installer it tells me that there are no drives installed when I try to partition.
I've checked out the drive using the adaptec BIOS utilities, tried formatting it, etc and I see a message about "1 JBOD DRIVE(S)" during the BIOS init before CentOS boots up. When I call SuperMicro, they tell me that I need to get the floppy disk image
ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SAS/Adaptec/Linux/11699/
but I don't have a floppy disk in the machine, and anaconda does install the 94xx driver, which leads me to believe that there's something else going on.
Any idea where I should go from here? I get the feeling that I'm just missing something basic....