RedHat and ICP Vortex Raid

[Charles Steinkuehler]

> I am having major headaches trying to get an ICP Vortex RAID controller to
> be recognized on install with Trustix Secure Linux, based on Redhat 6.1.
I
> have tried doing "linux dd" at the boot prompt and then using the RedHat
6.1
> driver disk with the gdth driver on it (for ICP cards).  I have also tried
> booting with "linux gdth=IRQ:19" to see if it might catch it that way.
>
> Unfortunately, there isn't much out there on the web in the way of
> troubleshooting these things.  Any suggestions, solutions, etc.  Even if
> your experience is with another brand of RAID card that you may have to
> tweak to work.

I setup a few RedHat 6.x systems with IBM ServeRAID cards.  Once the process
was figured out it was pretty easy, but I ran into several problems that
overlapped, including mis-matched versions of the RAID controller BIOS and
the RedHat released driver (required updating both BIOS and driver module to
matching versions), inability to use an IDE CD-ROM to boot (apparently the
ServeRAID BIOS stepped on the CD-ROM boot hooks or something with the
MoBo/BIOS I was using), and the fact that when using a SCSI CD-ROM, you
could only boot from it (for RedHat install or ServeRAID maintainence CD)
from a cold boot, not a warm boot or reset.  None of the problems is too
complicated, but the combination produces effects that can be very confusing
until you sort out all the issues.

Anyway, I got a working system, standardized on that setup for all my
machines, and now have about five of these systems online, all running
RedHat 7.2.

If there's linux support for your cards, you can probably make them work
somehow.  I'd probably start by verifying driver versions, BIOS versions,
and making sure the install kernel is actually compiled with support for the
ICP cards.  You can even try dropping into a shell at the first install
screen and see if you can manually insmod the driver, and/or verify it's
loaded.

You'll probably also need to configure your RAID settings prior to doing an
install.  On the IBM ServeRAID cards, you can do (limited) RAID
configuration in the BIOS, or you can boot their CD, which brings up
configuration environment that allows you to completely configure the card.
I assume the ICP cards will have similar procedures.

Of course, a quick boot/install into DOS/WinXX can also help verify you've
got everything installed and configured properly...

Good luck!

Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net