A friend of mine likes to feed my hardware addiction with old goods that the bank that he works at sends to the dumpster, which is either good or bad based on whether you ask me or my wife.

Currenly I am in possession of a 7-disk SCSI drive array made by Compaq (model 3161, a PITA to find documentation for) and a Compaq Smart-2/P RAID Controller. I plugged the card into my Mandrake 9.1 server, and it came right up in the boot. As the card booted a spinning slash would come up as each of the 7 drives wound up. there was a green HD light lighting up with each spin up, for a total of seven. Once complete, the card BIOS said that there was one logical array. Cool.

When `drake booted up, it showed my SCSI card using the cpqarray driver, and all looked fine there. However, nowhere in HardDrake did it show any SCSI drives, and running a dmesg only has a couple of mentions of potential activity:

md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00

...and that's it. I checked the /dev directory and the scsi directory is empty, and there don't seem to be any other possible mentions of SCSI anywhere.

My hardware enabler gave me a Compaq Smart Start CD version 5.3, but it's not booting successfully in my PC so that's of no value.

I'm relatively new to Linux (could you tell by me running a `drake server?) and even newer to SCSI, although I've been breaking computers now for about 8-9 years. There is only one SCSI connection in the back of the drive array, so I'm assuming that it auto-terminates (right?). There aren't any SCSI ID number setter-uppers, so that must be handled internally as well (right again?).

So, what can I do to get this drive array to work? I don't NEED the array, as I have 4x the space in one IDE drive, but I WANT to get it to work just to say that I did.

Thanks for reading through all that, and thanks even more if you are able to assist in this matter. Having 50 lbs of steely beigeness next to my server is a geeky turn-on, and I want it to be more than a cool noise-maker.

It looks like it registered as a raid array, /dev/md, multi-disk. Typically the first md device is /dev/md0, is there anything to the SCSI card's BIOS about initializing the array? Also, can you just paste in the whole "dmesg", or most of it at least.

Cheers,

Finegan