raidcontroller 2010S adaptec

[Frantisek Rysanek]

On 5 Oct 2005 at 11:49, brouwers roland lx wrote:
>
> I am installing Fedora3 on a siemens server TX200 with a RAID controller
> adaptec 2010S, including two interfaces which need a driver dpt_i2o and
> aic7xxx. I believe the aic7xxx is included with Fed.
>

I believe that the 2010 is a Zero-channel RAID, and when you 
install it in a PC with an onboard dual-channel aic7902 
(plain U320 SCSI HBA), the ZRC zaps the aic's BIOS, and 
inserts its own RAID BIOS into the boot sequence.

I may be wrong but I seem to recall that the ZCR even
prevents the aic7902 from reporting itself to any PCI
probes launched by the host system - as a result you
can't even see the aic7902 on the PCI bus, and Linux
won't detect it -> insmod aic79xx.o is no use anymore.

All you need to do is "insmod dpt_i2o", I believe.
Of course this will find some RAID drives only if you
have created them in advance, in the BIOS utility.

I don't know if FC4 has this module in the installer or not.
If not, maybe Adaptec provides a precompiled FC4 driver disk.
If not, I'm out of good advice - although some time ago
I've managed to replace the stock kernel with some
homebrew vanilla on a RH8.0 install CD with isolinux,
which was not too complicated. To do that, you need
a working Linux machine with the tools needed to compile
a kernel, + a fresh version of mkisofs and cdrecord
(and a burner).


Personally I'm not using the DPT I2O RAID family anymore,
for performance reasons and based on some bad experience
many years ago, upon my first encounter with this RAID family.
If you prefer to stick with Adaptec, use an AAC RAID to get 
some serious performance (ASR-2120, 2200, 2130, 2230).


Frank Rysanek