[SOLVED] Install with Raid Controller Drivers

[jakew85]

Hi Nub here,

Is there are walk-through someone might have created for installing Centos 7 with additional raid controller drivers?
When I install Centos on a Dell 7600 workstation it doesn't see my drives. I suspect i need these drivers
https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en ... erId=3G94H

If I ctl+alt+F2 to the shell,
mount a usb key with the drivers and rpm -Uvh the rpm files it doesn't see the drives.
Is there a way to rescan for new hardware? Or hopefully a better way to do this?

Thanks!

[TrevorH]

I suspect that if it's a workstation then it won't have a hardware RAID controller at all, those are mostly on servers not workstations. Can you post the output from lspci -nn | grep -i raid so that we can see what model of RAID it has.

If it's FakeRAID then the usual advice is to disable the RAID function in the BIOS and set it up in AHCI mode then install using linux software RAID.

[jakew85]

Thanks for the reply.

The output of lspci shows:
06:00.0 RAID bus controller [0104]: LSI Logic /Symbios Logic MegaRaid SAS 2008 [Falcon] [1000:0073](rev 03)

[TrevorH]

Code: Select all

$ grep -i 1000 /lib/modules/3.10.0-693.21.1.el7.x86_64/modules.* | grep -i 0073
/lib/modules/3.10.0-693.21.1.el7.x86_64/modules.alias:alias pci:v00001000d00000073sv*sd*bc*sc*i* megaraid_sas

That says the card is already supported and you don't need any third party drivers. It also says it is a hardware RAID controller

Did you use the controller BIOS to set up an array?

[jakew85]

Thanks for the reply, the drive is not in a raid set, maybe that is the issue. Although it looks like there is something going on.

dmesg |grep mega
[ 12.618152] megasas: 07.701.17.00-rh1
[ 12.623320] megaraid_sas 0000:06:00.0: FW now in Ready state
[ 12.623349] megaraid_sas 0000:06:00.0: irq 32 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 12.623360] megaraid_sas 0000:06:00.0: firmware supports msix : (0)
[ 12.623362] megaraid_sas 0000:06:00.0: current msix/online cpus : (1/4)
[ 12.623363] megaraid_sas 0000:06:00.0: RDPQ mode : (disabled)
[ 12.643453] megaraid_sas 0000:06:00.0: Failed to init firmware
[ 12.643557] megaraid_sas 0000:06:00.0: Failed from megasas_init_fw 5537

[TrevorH]

Yeah, that doesn't look good. If this is a Dell branded controller, did you check to see if there are any firmware updates for it on support.euro.dell.com (adjust for other locations!)? I think I'd also try going into its BIOS and resetting it to factory defaults and reconfiguring it as it sounds like you have no data on it to preserve. And, yes, I think the drive probably has to be part of an array to be seen properly - even if it's a RAID 0 array of one drive. But from the look of that dmesg output, I don't think it's that, it looks more serious.

I found a Redhat KB article that is talking about this error on an IBM version of the same controller and, there, they recommend "Upgrade ServeRAID M1015 controller to firmware 20.1.1-0059." and also "A bug in the RAID firmware causes the controller to become unresponsive when flipping in and out of JBOD mode.". I take that latter one to mean that perhaps it would not do this if you create an array that's other than JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks).

[jakew85]

Thank you for the assistance with this issue.
It turns out the issue was corrected by updating the BIOS on the machine to the latest level.