Greetings all,

A Compaq DL380 system has been built, ready for installation of Debian(i.e. potato).

However, this system has a Smart Array 221 controller with two 9GB SCSI drives - the controller is setup for RAID-1 giving me a single virtualdrive of almost 9GB. No performance cautions here, given that it's
primarily going to be a mail exchanger and backup squid?

The guts of the question was going to be "how the hell do I install potato
on this thing?", but I since figured out that the initial trick is to use
the compact flavour of install disks (seems they have support for relevant
things like RAID gizmos that aren't supported by the standard rescue/root
images).

More specifically, ansers/comments/whatever to any of the following would
be greatly appreciated:

* For reasons I haven't yet fathomed, the system as presented for
installation of Debian has an unused onboard RAID controller but we are
using the PCI -221 controller - so my "disk" is on controller 1.
However, booting the compact rescue and root floppies gives me lots of c0*
devices but no c1* devices. Do I have a better alternative than manually
creating these devices with mknod then restarting the install? If I don't
do this the installation thinks there are no disks :-(

* Any opinions as to if the above is a bug in boot-floppies?

* Re booting, kernel-source-2.2.17pre6-1 has Documentation/cpqarray.txt
which refers to needing "to use a modified lilo if you want to boot from a
disk array", without providing a pointer to this. Anyone got a pointer?

* Is it likely to be orders of magnitude simpler/better/whatever to
request/demand an IDE disk for the root device? Or even a non-RAID SCSI
disk on the on-motherboard controller?

As always, pointers into online docs etc greatfully appreciated.

Thanks,

Naresh