[CentOS] New controller card issues

m.roth at 5-cent.us
Tue, 26 May 2015 18:07:43 -0000

Running CentOS 5 (long story, will be updated some day). A 5 yr old Dell
PE R415. Whoever spec'd the order, they got the cheapest, embedded
controller. Push came to shove - these things gag on a drive > 2TB. So, we
bought some PERC H200's for it, and its two mates. This morning, I brought
the system down, and put in the card, and moved the SATA cables.

This did not end well.

The new card seemed to see the drives, it loaded the initrd... and kernel
panic'd every time when it went to switch root. I went into the card's
firmware and set the first drive to boot. No change.

Upshot was that I actually had to pull the card - once it was in, and set,
it insisted that it was 0 in boot order, and would not let me take it out,
even though I'd reconnected the SATA connector to the on-board one.

So: my manager and I are suspecting that the initrd simply doesn't have
the driver for the card. I'm going to rebuild the initrd (once I figure
out how to do that without the card in the box). The reason I'm posting is
to ask y'all if anyone out there has some *other* thoughts as to what the
problem might be, other than the initrd.

Thanks in advance.

         mark