I'm trying to install FC 6 on old Dell 6300 which has the PERC2/SC RAID Controller for its SCSI drives.

It worked on RH 7.3 and I've found a post suggesting the driver is not in the 2.6 kernel.

Is there a way to tell it to use the driver originally made for the 2.4 kernel during the install of a 2.6 kernel distro?

By the way - Google shows other people talking about the Dell 6300 and PERC but they are talking about an Adaptec PERC card not the PERC2/SC which is a Megatrends PERC card instead.

A driver module compiled for a 2.4 kernel will not work on a 2.6 kernel. During installation, most distros have an option to use alternative kernels, including the latest 2.4 kernel. That route is probably your best bet when trying to install FC 6.

Luckily we had a spare PERC 4/DC card around so were able to swap out the PERC 2/DC for that. FC 6 (with 2.6 kernel) recognized the PERC 4/DC and installed like a champ.

I did that last night. This morning I saw a response from the same question I'd posted on my LUG's mail list. Since I'm under time pressure I'm not going to put the PERC 2/SC back and reinstall. However, I'll post that response for people that may not have a spare PERC avaialable as I did:

The response suggests the 2.6 kernel will recognize the older PERC card:

Other information gathered since my original post. I haven't gone very far in this but will post it here in case someone else has more cycles to try any of this than I do:

This Suse forum talks about how the guy solved the issue for another old MegaRAID card. My read of it suggests that it could be adapted to Fedora:

http://www.suseblog.com/?p=156

Where he says to hit "Ctrl-Alt-F2" you can just hit F5 on the FC6 boot to enter Rescue Mode and from there do the /cat/proc/version.

That's as far as I got on another system like the one I first described that still has a PERC2 in it.

Other links that may help with above for FC:

How to compile kernel for Fedora:
http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_fedora

Doc for intrd build:
http://boink.pbwiki.com/LinuxP2V

Well I finally started to work on this again yesterday since I had some spare cycles. On doing a Google for comments in the above link about megaraid.h I eventually found my way to a site that had the answer for FC4 (and later in thread FC5) which led me to believe it would work for FC6.

I tried it and sure enough it worked.

Short answer: The driver is already there.

Complete answer: The 2.6 kernel in FC4 FC5 FC6 (and presumably later) contains TWO megaraid drivers which are LSI MEGARAID AND LSI MEGARAID_MBOX.
When you do the initial boot it probes your hardware and defaults to using the LSI MEGARAID_MBOX. This however, won't work on the older cards like the Dell PERC 2/SC (made by American Megatrends which later became LSI).

However, you can tell your system NOT to probe and then manually select the driver.

Steps:
1) Boot from the FC6 installation CD
2) At first screen hit F4 for Kernel
3) At next screen at "boot:" prompt type "linux noprobe" and hit return.
4) At prompts to pick language and keyboard select as normal.
5) A box will appear to select driver.
Scroll down the list and highlight the LSI MEGARAID driver (you'll also see LSI MEGARAID_MBOX - do NOT use MBOX).
6) NOTE: This step only needed if you have additional SCSI adapters.
On my system there were also 2 Adaptec 7890 SCSI adapters and an Adaptec 7860 SCSI (only God knows why this box had 3 Adaptecs AND the PERC 2). Because it found other SCSI adapters it opened the box to select driver again.
Chose "AHA-2470, 28xx, 29xx, 39xx (AIC7xxx)" driver.
7) It will go to the screen asking to test the media. I chose "skip"
8) It goes to a Devices screen - this should show all the drivers you selected in 5 and 6. Click "Done".
9) Proceed with the installation as normal from there.

After following the above the system booted up cleanly from the LUN on the PERC 2/SC. Also I ran "yum update" to update all the software to latest version after the install - this installed a new kernel and that also booted fine from the LUN.