[CentOS] LSI software raid with centos 5.4

Sat May 22 17:05:44 UTC 2010
Ryan Wagoner <rswagoner at gmail.com>

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 12:40 PM, CList <centoslist at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been trying to install CentOS 5.4 on a Intel SR1530SHS, Intel S3200SH
> mainboard.. It has a 3 x 1TB sata hotswap drives with LSI software raid
> onboard.
>
> I had configured the LSI to have Sata0 and Sata1 with raid 1 and the third
> drive as a hotspare drive.
>
> Format the harddisk and installation was a breeze. The server rebooted into
> a blank screen and the cursor just keep blinking.
>
> Please advise.
>
> Thanks
> wL

I've had this problem on an Intel board when I had hard drives on the
motherboards SATA ports and some on the motherboards silicon image
SATA ports. The bios seemed to swap the order the drives were present
to grub so it couldn't boot. I would either get a blinking cursor or
GRUB. I ended up putting all the drives on a LSI PCI Express card and
everything just worked. However in your situation it sounds like you
only have drives on the LSI controller.

I would try booting into resuce mode with the CentOS installation CD.
You can do this by typing linux rescue. Have it search and mount the
CentOS installation. Look at /boot/grub/device.map and make sure hd0
references the correct /dev/sd device. Also chroot /mnt/sysimage and
try grub-install /dev/sd

Ryan