A friend of mine was going to install Xen on Debian Wheezy but ran across a little snag when her server arrived.

Her IBM x3300 m4 has a ServeRAID M1115/M5110 Controller and she was going to have to jump through a few hoops to install support for that under Debian.

She was considering using Redhat, but wants to try Slackware if there is support for that RAID controller.

A few Slack's back I recall having to do a:

Before fdisk'ing during the install, but didn't know what the status was at this point - whether the huge kernel supports it or not.

UPDATE:

Apparently, there were several links out there possibly dealing with the issue of the RAID controller, and meagasr.ko might be the module needed.

ServeRAID C100 over Debian Compatibility http://www.jimmy.co.at/weblog/?p=87

The line:

Sounds like something I had to do ten years ago in lilo.conf to get an old Slackware version to recognize those old fake Promise RAID controllers for IDE drives.

This archive here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.../msg01137.html let me to a Debian custom kernel that is supposed to support this machine is here:

http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/

IBM's references to support for this in Redhat and SUSE Enterprise:

http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry...d=MIGR-5089068

http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry...d=MIGR-5088768

In short, what she's going to need is a way to boot the Slackware64 -current DVD that recognizes the HDD (fdisk -l should reveal a /dev/sda which it currently does not).

I may have to create this DVD for her and then have her download it so she can do the install.

I didn't see anything that appeared like a plan of attack at http://docs.slackware.com, the readme's on the DVD are geared towards software RAID, not getting the kernel to recognize a RAID controllers devices, etc.

I'm hoping that I can find a tutorial or howto on how to prep an install DVD or whatnot to support the device, then perhaps install the module with modprobe or something, then create the initrd so everything comes up all nice and pretty like.

If I can provide her with a resolution then I'll be happy to do a write up the Slackware documentation project, which should help others to create a custom install method for devices not supported by the default huge kernel.

Anyone know the status of this?

Thoughts, suggestions?

Thanks!

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