Installing driver for Areca RAID Controller
 

FIXED !

Not having a FDD on this server, I had decided to copy the file 'driver.img' to a directory on the Linux box and load it from there. I now know that the file was actually a floppy disk image and HAD to be copied to a FDD which would make the relevant patch files available. When I did this, everything worked fine.


Can you help please ?

I am trying to build a Samba file server based on a Gigabyte GA-7A8DW, 2 x Opteron 244 1.8GHz CPUs, 2 x 512Mb Registered ECC memory sticks, and an Areca ARC-1120 RAID Controller.

I have built the file server and installed Windows 2000 SP4 on an 8Gb PATA HDD without problem. I installed the ARC-1120 RAID Controller with 4 borrowed WD Raptor 74Gb SATA disks. The resulting 200Gb array works absolutely fine.

I have now installed SuSE Linux 10.0 (Dual boot) and am trying to install the ARC-1120 under that. I understood that this distro included a driver for the ARC-1120 - it appears not to. I downloaded Areca's "Driver User's Guide" and am trying to follow that.

I created a directory "/Areca" and installed the file driver.img in it - I did as follows :
# cd /Areca
# patch
This doesn't appear to do anything. I also tried :
# patch < driver.img
That doesn't work either.

Can you please help me ? How do I install a driver under Linux ? The relevant Areca URL is support/index/dc1120.htm


Controller name : ARC-1120
Firmware version : v1.39 2006-1-4
Serial Number : Y529CAABAR200624

Hard Disk Drives : 4 x Western Digital 74Gb 10,000rpm WDC WD740GD-00FLA2
HDD Firmware Rev. : 31.08F31

Many thanks for any help with what is probably a pretty basic question.

Areca
 

I am in a similar situation - a server that lacks a floppy drive. Did you have to connect a floppy device to your system? I have used rawrite to copy the image to a floppy, but I am wondering if there is a way to retrieve the files from the floppy.

As it happens, I did temporarily install a FDD. However, I believe that I needn't have done so . . . as I understand it, I could have used 'dd' to dump the files into a directory on the server . . . I may well be talking complete spheres here.

The server has now been up and running for some while with 3.2Tb available. I did have a problem with one of the eight 500Gb HDDs going flaky and needing replacement and a consequent RAID rebuild. This all worked well - the problems started when I also had to run 'reiserfsck' which took about 8 hours - I didn't have a complete recent backup (I can't afford an 8 tape LTO-3 Autochanger) - scary !