Dell SAS 6/ir Raid Controller

imruins

I am attempting to install the Trixbox software and their modified version of the CentOS 4.5 operating system on a Dell T100. If you are unfamiliar with Trixbox it is a pbx system that has very little driver support and their customer service is basically non-existent for non-supported hardware (aka 99% of available hardware). Anyway, I downloaded the driver from Dell but it I still am getting nowhere. My hope is that someone here is familiar with the setup or has previous experience and can help me get the OS to recognize the SATA drives so that I can get the software installed.

I tried posting on the centos site but I havent gotten a response yet, so maybe this isn't such an easy problem to tackle, but as I understand it - Linux handles drivers and hardware pretty well so I'm not sure why this would be such a hurdle.

Thanks!

woboyle

You have to go into the Dell bios and change the drive type settings so that it recognizes all the sata drives as sata, and doesn't make them look to the system like ata drives, otherwise your Linux drivers will only see up to 4 "ata" drives and none of the raid-able sata drives.

imruins

The bios doesnt allow me to change to sata otherwise I would have. I did purchase the SAS 6/ir controller as the centos documentation claims to be compatible with this controller type and still no luck. I think I'm throwing in the towel... this seems to be a common problem with the operating system and since nobody is getting paid, its a hole that isnt getting repaired.

woboyle

Well, it might be supported by CentOS 5 but not version 4 - don't know. If it is natively supported by CentOS 4, then the raid management tools should find it. In any case, I do not recommend that you use a raid device for your system boot drive. That way you can install the drivers and manage your devices after you install the basic os.