On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Lei Liu wrote:
> Hi, Kim-Ee.
> I am reading your message posted on Software RAID discussion group.
> I have similar problems as John Leach. We have a Dell server that uses
> MegaRAID. We did not buy Dell's OS because we plan to use Linux. We have
> RedHat 5.0, but the CD would not boot, because there is not driver support.
> Jeff Jones' documentation explains how to add MegaRAID driver to a machine
> that is already running RedHat Linux. But how can I put Linux on a machine
> that currently have no OS and all the hard drives are controlled by the
> MegaRAID? Any suggestions? I don't have much experiences with Linux. Maybe
> you can point me to some recent documentations.
> Thanks.
(BTW, I'm CC-ing this to the mailing list as people with hardware RAID
often encounters this problem.)
The easiest thing I can think of is to get hold of either a SCSI
controller (which RedHat Linux recognizes) or some cheap, spare IDE drive.
Let's assume you take the second option. Boot Linux, recompile the kernel
with the MegaRAID driver statically included (i.e., _not_ modularized),
and reboot Linux with the new kernel (still on IDE).
Now, the kernel sees the RAID controller and all those expensive drives
attached to it (you must have configured it properly beforehand using the
RAID BIOS setup).
Install Linux onto the RAID subsystem, do a Lilo with rootdir specified
(Lilo is your friend -- read its carefully written docs), and your server
should be up and running.
-- Kim-Ee
