[CentOS] Dell mirror raid boot problems

Wed Apr 29 02:28:27 UTC 2009
Gregory P. Ennis <PoMec at PoMec.Net>

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 21:20 -0500, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 18:06 -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
> > Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> > > Everyone,
> > >
> > > I was recently given a Dell raid 386 server that had drives that had
> > > gone bad.  I replaced the drives with a couple terrabyte sata Seagate
> > > drives, and set up the bios for a mirrored raid configuration.
> > >
> > > I was able to install Centos 5.2 without difficulty, but when it was
> > > time to perform the 1st boot it went to grub instead of booting off of
> > > one of the mirrored drives.
> > >
> > > I could not figure out how to boot through grub, so I changed the bios
> > > to look at both drives unmirrored.  At that point I was able to boot to
> > > one of the drives, and the second drive was not mounted.
> > >
> > > The raid logic is within the bios and mother board of the Dell machine.
> > > Can any of you point me to some literature about making this system work
> > > as a mirrored raid system.
> > >   
> > 
> > What model Dell server is this?  Surely, this isn't a 386 (16 to 40mhz 
> > from circa 1989?!?)     What Dell RAID controller model does it have?  
> > They are pretty much all called PERC something, but there are many 
> > generations.      Is this a true raid (controller based, with a battery 
> > backed write cache), or a bogus soft (fake) raid setup?  if its the 
> > latter, I'd set it up with linux native raid, and not use the BIOS raid 
> > at all
> > 
> > 
> Everyone,
> 
> Thanks for everyone's comments.
> 
> To make things as clear as I can this is a DELL XPS Gen 2 Series a 32
> bit machine using an i386 Centos OS 5.2 that was automatically upgraded
> to 5.3 by yum.
> 
> The RAID controller appears to be on the mother board to me.  The CPU is
> an Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz.    BIOS version of A02.
> 
> In the bios I can turn on RAID on but when the system boots I get a grub
> prompt.  The only way to get the system to boot is to turn off the RAID
> configuration and boot to one drive.  
> 
> I have not seen anything regarding PERC.  The SATA drives are connected
> directly to the motherboard.
> 
> I have still not been able to make it work as RAID.
> 
> Thanks to everyone for your help.  This is my first RAID controller.
> 
> Greg
> _______________________________________________

Sorry forgot to add that this was identified in the RAID setup as :

Intel RAID for Serial ATA - RAID BIOS v3.5.0.2568