RAID array troubles... suggestions? SOLVED!

[Rich Edelman]

On Tuesday 14 September 2004 10:53 am, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> On Tue, September 14, 2004 10:32 am, Rich Edelman said:
> > I'm trying to get a new fileserver at work up and running, we're using
> > SuSE 9.1 with a 3ware 9500S-12 RAID card (uses the 3w-9xxx module), and
> > 12 250GB SATA drives.
> >
> > Problem is, I can't create a partition on this thing of over 300G.
>
> Maybe you need to google around for patched disk utilities?
I have tried the newest parted and fdisk utilities...

> > I suppose I COULD forego the partition and create the array right on
> > /dev/sdb (instead of /dev/sdb1)...
>
> Um, why not?  Isn't that where you're supposed to put it?  Unless
> /dev/sdb1 is a logical partition (more usually partition 3 or 4 is), you
> would put the partition on the root device, not under another partition.
> (I'm not familiar with Linux RAID, this may be normal.)
>
> What about Mfr. supplied utilities?  How do they want to partition?

Erm, sorry.. I meant create the filesystem right on /dev/sdb instead 
of /dev/sdb1.

What mfr supplied utilities? 3Ware cards don't come with anything like that, 
just raid drivers for the OS, and you use OS utilities (parted, fdisk) to 
partition.

Anyway, thanks to a helpful guy in #suse on irc.freenode.net and some helpful 
3ware engineers, the problem is solved. When using this card in a 64-bit PCI 
slot, you MUST boot with 'acpi=off', otherwise ACPI resets the controller and 
the card is non-functional. This was previously noted for SuSE 9.0, but I 
guess wasn't supposed to happen on newer distros. 3ware is going to update 
their documentation. :)

Rich