FC2 & FC3 SCSI issues

[Bill Cronk]

I have not resolved my SCSI RAID box problems when running either FC2 or 
FC3t2 or FC3t3. I have been reading over past messages in the 
fedora-test-list archives and have not found anything related yet to the 
problem I am experiencing and am having difficulty resolving.

So let me reload my issues here to the list:

First off I have multiple RAID boxes originally setup on seperate 
servers. I now have new servers which I want to put into my network, but 
due to the problems getting the RAID boxes to load correctly I can't.

The problem(s): Originally I had the hard drive ID across all drives in 
a RAID set to the default linux setting, did not have them configured 
with 'fd' ID. These RAID boxes work on older installations and two of 
them work on one server which has the full FC2 install.... I don't know 
why they work and I can not duplicate the setup on new installs. They do 
have different motherboards between the two servers.

On the latest test server I have FC3 installed, built one new RAID box 
of 14 drives in a JBOD configuration with software raid5, and added on 
the second SCSI port another RAID box setup as raid0 from another 
server. I can make both start up and work by running a script which does 
what should happen in the boot cycle. If I leave the normal raidtab file 
in place then all fails and the boot cycle drops into single user mode 
for repairs to the system. I believe now that this problem could have 
been overcome by removing the spaces in the raidtab file at the 
beginning of the 'raid-level' statement.

However, following a suggestion from a person here in the 
fedora-test-list, I changed the drive ID to 'fd' and I started to try 
using mdadm to mange the RAID which when combined now opens another 
whole set of problems for me. One RAID box works fine on the Adaptec 
U320 add on card, two RAID boxes starts the confusion and results in one 
box not setting up due to the /dev/md1 device file missing. Tried 
creating the /dev/md1 then setting up the RAID and it all works just 
fine. Reboot the computer and /dev/md1 is gone.

So how is one supposed to fix this type of a problem which basically 
revolves around the missing /dev/md1, but my impression is that between 
udev and hotplug this should not have happened. Shouldn't the additional 
SCSI RAID device being detected have automatically setup the device file 
needed and connected to it? What needs to happen then if I needed to 
plug onto three out of four SCSI ports on this box? Currently I believe 
nothing would happen... it would just not work.

Any suggestions??

Sorry for being long winded...

Bill