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

Wed Mar 9 17:40:19 UTC 2011
Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com>

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 11:51 AM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
> Peter Peltonen wrote:
>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.

I think that it's ctrl-r and that you have to set up "virtual disks"
using the "physical disks".