SuperMicro 5013

[John Rowan]

Joel Jaeggli wrote:

>
> On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, John Rowan wrote:
>
>> When I boot the system it displays
>>
>> Phoenix - Award BIOS V6.00PG
>> SuperMicro P4SCA/P4SCE BIOS 1.3A
>
>
> yeah it's a p4sca or p4sce, thats consistent with everything else.
>
>> On the bottom of the initial screen on left side it says
>> 4/14/2005 - Canterwood - 6A79BSX9C-00
>
>
> canterwood is intel 7210 chipset.
>
>> Pressing CTRL-I brings up the screen to configure the level of RAID 
>> (0 or 1)
>> On top of that screen it says Intel RAID for Serial ATA V3.5.0.3003
>>
>> The front of the case says SuperMicro but on the top (slide off) 
>> cover it says Visionman.  I've been to both SuperMicro.com and 
>> Visionman.com web sites but neither has a Linux driver for Intel.  
>> They have drivers they say are for RH 9 with specific kernel versions 
>> but neither of those work. I don't understand why the Fedora Core 4 
>> installation (which recognized the RAID controller and loaded the 
>> correct driver) failed to boot after it said the installation was 
>> complete.
>
>
> Are you raiding the disks in the bios? If you are you shouldn't do 
> that, it's a software raid controller. Rather you use linux software 
> raid for that purpose.
>
> Fedora core 4 does recognize the ich5r as a sata controller, but not 
> as a raid controller, so your the bios is probably pointing at a raid 
> device that doesn't really exist without some driver glue.
>
>>  I'm in the process of installing FC4 for the fifth time now to see 
>> if there is some way to salvage this hardware.
>
>
> I've got a couple p4sci's out in the field running fc3, the only reall 
> difference between those and these is 64 bit pci slots.
>
>> It's looking more and more like I'll be getting an RMA from 
>> TigerDirect.com for this one.
>>
>>
>>
>
Holly crap Batman, I think you've hit it.  Ironically I had just deleted 
the RAID definition leaving the drives as non RAID devices.  I booted to 
try an installation of SuSE Pro 9.1 again.  I was very surprised that 
after deleting the RAID definition Fedora Core 4 booted from the disk 
drive!!!!  But it is hanging now after
Enabling Swap Space           [   OK  ]
I don't see any disk drive lights but placing my hand on the case I can 
feel vibrations like there is quite a bit of disk drive activity.
I CTRL-ALT-F8 to get to the graphical window and saw it was trying 
(unsuccessfully) to obtain an IP address from the DHCP server.  I booted 
with the CD into rescue mode and changed from BOOTPROTO=DHCP to none 
then configured an IP address.  Now the machine boots okay.

Okay, now that it is booting  with NON RAIDed drives (two), that leaves 
me with a problem in that the server is for Raining Data's Pick 
application which requires RAW partitions.  If it's not hardware RAID 
and I have to rely on Linux's software RAID then Linux won't be 
mirroring the RAW partition on which Pick stores it's data.

I know this problem is specific to Raining Data's app but suggestions 
from this group on how to protect the RAW partition since I can't use 
the Intel software RAID would be welcome. 

Last question though, why is the Intel RAID for Serial ATA which appears 
during POST considered software RAID?  I would think this to be hardware 
RAID.