Useless Linux ESRT2 Drivers??

[idata]

Long story short, I could not get the Linux ESRT2 RAID driver (megasr) to install properly under Centos 5.4 (Red Hat clone) on an Intel s3210shlx board. This applies to both the LSI and Matrix RAID OPROMs. The long story details are in the attachment.

However, I DID get Matrix RAID to work with no drivers needed - looks like it's using either Linux dmraid or the Matrix RAID ahci BIOS.

So, what's the purpose of those Linux drivers if they don't work?? I wasted two days trying to troubleshoot this... Unless, of course, I missed something...

[Edward_Z_Intel]

Reading your attachment, the /dev/sdb device mentioned should be the USB floppy drive. The idea is to mount the floppy drive and run the script. Did you remove the floppy from the system? What's the device name of your USB floppy drive when you load the driver?

[idata]

My floppy drive is plugged into the mainboard and is /dev/fd0. I unplugged my SATA CD-ROM drive in favor of a USB CD-ROM drive for the installation, so it must be /dev/sdb.

[idata]

Hmmm...I read your reply again and a light went on. Sounds like target /dev/sd2 in the installation instructions assumes that you're using a USB floppy drive. Perhaps if I use /dev/fd0 as my target instead...

[Edward_Z_Intel]

Yes you're correct. The installation instructions assumes you're using a USB floppy, because most current Intel server boards don't have an on-board floppy connector. However, S3200SH is an exeption. If you're using a lagacy floppy drive, you can skip steps 9 and 10, and type "mount /dev/fd0 /temp" in step 12.

[idata]

I wish those s3200sh-series boards had NOT been the exception and used on-board ATA connectors rather than floppy...thanks again for your insight!!

[idata]

There were 2 situations i faced.

1. The ESRT zip provided by intel contain varios img files according to the distribution/kernel version which we need to install. Alas, above version 5.5 of RHEL, all the images are corrupted. SLES i didnt' check. If i was looking to install a different distribution say Ubuntu, what would be the solution? compile the driver?

2. I used a usb boot in order to install the drivers. Just make the usb bootable with "unetboot" and don't use full ISO dvd of CentOS/RHEL. We just need to provide boot.iso available within the big DVD. Next step would be to copy the DVD image (may need to reduce size by removing some rpm as vfat does not support this big size of file to fit in a FAT USB FS which is what we need to install). and then copy the img file and the scripts under the top directory of the usb (just to make things simple). The rest of the instructions are provided by the readme.

Hope this would help.

[idata]

Hats off to Edward Zhao for pointing out that /dev/sdb is a reference to a USB floppy drive. I modified the installation instructions for my situation (floppy is /dev/fd0) and the install looks good!! See the attachment for the modified instructions (same numbers as the original instructions for reference).

One last question - the install creates a new initrd image. Will this image be wiped out if I apply any vendor-supplied kernel updates within Centos 5.4?

Thanks