Problems with SW/HW RAID on Dell Poweredge 1550

[Karl Keyton <kkeyton valueclick com>]

Hello, I'm currently working with a Dell Poweredge 1550 w/ 3 disks and
configuring RAID is proving to be difficult.

First I attempted to do a fresh install of Redhat 7.2 on the machine w/ an
Adaptec 2100S RAID card. This failed to work properly under any
circumstance (result was always the same, the install would freeze when
copying packages), even using the driver disk provided by Doug Ledford
didn't do much better, it managed to make it through the install however
the machine would panic under heavy load and report scsi errors (hardware
is brand new and has been tested in different machines, no harddrive
failures)

Next I removed the RAID card and re-installed Redhat using the Software
RAID option (using Disk Druid, created partitions on disks 2 and 3 as type
Linux raid autodetect). This moved the install along a great deal better
and the system booted up just fine.

Move forward to a few days ago, after the machine had been running fine
for a couple of weeks:

mount loses the RAID volume while the system is under heavy load, and the
problem is tracked down to a "failure" of one of the drives. Odd seeing as
having one drive go bad (on initial inspection anyway) should not cause
the RAID-1 set to fail completely. Errors reported look as such:

Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout :
pid 0, scsi0, channel 0, id 2, lun 0 W
rite (10) 00 02 8e 5a bf 00 00 08 00
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout :
pid 0, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 W
rite (10) 00 00 00 2d 57 00 00 a8 00
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: SCSI host 0 abort (pid 0) timed out -
resetting
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel
0.
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: (scsi0:0:0:0) Synchronous at 160.0
Mbyte/sec, offset 63.
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: (scsi0:0:2:0) Synchronous at 160.0
Mbyte/sec, offset 63.
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: Device 08:21 not ready.
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:21, sector 42883680
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: Device 08:21 not ready.
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:21, sector 42883704
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: Device 08:21 not ready.
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:21, sector 27224256
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: raid1: sdc1: rescheduling block 27224256
Nov 27 03:37:14 machoke kernel: raid1: sdc1: unrecoverable I/O read error
for block 27224256


Restarting the machine and re-mounting the drives in the RAID-1 set works
fine, both drives work fine w/o error.

Now I either wish to fix the software RAID problem (however that may be
done), completely unconfigure the software RAID (which I can't seem to do,
the machine always wishes to boot the RAID set no matter what I put in
/etc/fstab) or try re-installing the Adaptec RAID card with the Nov 16
driver images.

Any suggestions?

-Karl


-----------------------
Karl Keyton
Network Systems Manager
ValueClick
work: (818)575-4721
cell: (818)968-7703