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

Wed Mar 9 16:51:21 UTC 2011
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

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