Peter Peltonen wrote: > 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? Nope. They may have said they "pre-installed the RAID, but you really need to go into the setup (<ctrl-c>, or -f, or whatever), and see what it presents ->logically<- (key buzzword). If it hasn't been initialized, or put into logical configuration, then it simply will not present the logical drives to the o/s, and AFAIK, it will *not* present the physical drives at all. mark