I have a dell poweredge server with an older AMI MegaRAID card. I have verified everything to be working correctly. I created the logical drives (two logicals of Raid 1 and 5). I initialize the logical drives per request from the RAID utility. Reboot and boot from CD to install centos. You can see that is loads the i2o_block driver for my RAID card. Select graphical install, pick language and keyboard style. Now we have a problem. I get an error that says something to the effect of:

Unable to determine geometry of device blah blah blah/hda

Now... I have SCSI drives in RAID... not IDE. IIRC, hda meant those were IDE drives or drives mimicking the legacy hardware. Since it's SCSI shouldn't it be sda? I do have an IDE optical drive... is that what it's trying to write to?

Then it asks me I must initialize the drives in order for them to be readable, I say yes and nothing happens... I get the unable to determine geometry error again. Go in circles about 5 more times and I eventually get to the screen where it asks me to create partitions and there are none.

I've been pulling my hair out all day. I've been reading and poking around in linux forums all day. I cannot understand what the deal is here... Anybody have any suggestions?


TIA!!!

first update your bios on the pc to the latest normally thats a bios limitation !

Funny you mention that I am one step ahead of you though. I just got done flashing EVERYTHING. I flashed the RAID card, which had a firmware about 1 year newer. I flashed the mb bios to a version several years newer. I also flash the ESM which included the power paralleling junk, server monitoring goodies and more importantly, the backplane. Everything in this server had old firmware, but it is now up to date. Unfortunately, efforts were fruitless. I still get the same error.

I did try a CentOS 4 disk. Instead of giving me a wash of errors it just told me that there were no drives available. CentOS 4 had the "megaraid" driver instead of the "i20" driver.

did you setup the array first using the configuration utility on your card?
when you boot it should ask you to go into the config to change the array !

did you build a mirror array?

Yeah... I built a RAID 1 and 5 array from the drives I had.

But... I figured it out.

After much RTFM'ing I found an obscure archived thread about 30 pages into a google search. The guy had an AMI MegaRAID card like me. CentOS didnt' like the i20 setting.... instead he set the controller from "I20" to "Mass Storage". After a reboot, the CentOS install successfully found the drives without a hitch.

Thanks to those that helped.

glad you got it worked out