Dell PERC RAID controller

[Patrick Hurrelmann]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:54:52 -0600
Brett Glass <brett at lariat.org> wrote:

> Dell has recently announced that the firmware in some of its PERC 
> RAID controllers is faulty and should be upgraded. I have a client 
> who's running a FreeBSD system with one of these controllers. 
> Unfortunately, Dell doesn't consider FreeBSD to be a "supported" 
> operating system, and is offering CD-ROMs that install new firmware 
> only for Windows or Red Hat Linux. It is unclear how they expect 
> one to upgrade under a different OS.
> 
> What do folks here know about the problems (which Dell didn't 
> describe in detail)? Is the new firmware compatible with FreeBSD's 
> drivers? How can one update the firmware from FreeBSD (run their 
> Linux update under Linux emulation, perhaps)?
> 
> One of the problems I'm facing, while researching this, is that 
> Dell uses the name "PERC" for controllers that are actually made by 
> at least two third party manufacturers. The messages that this one 
> generates at boot time are:
> 
> amr0: <AMI MegaRAID> mem 0xfeb00000-0xfeb0ffff irq 7 at device 4.0 on pci0
> amr0: <PERC 3/SC> Firmware 1.72, BIOS 3.27, 32MB RAM
> 
> ...
> 
> amrd0: <MegaRAID logical drive> on amr0
> amrd0: 51834MB (106156032 sectors) RAID 5 (optimal)
> 
> Any help in upgrading the faulty firmware would be MUCH 
> appreciated. I don't subscribe to this list full-time, so please 
> copy my address on followups.
> 
> --Brett Glass


Hi,

try upgrading with floppy images. we've upgraded all our dell-server (era-cards, system-bios + firmware, raid firmware on different PERC's) by floppys.

you can download the images and prepare them somewhere else. i took the redhat images and used dd on my freebsd-box to write them to floppys. all went well. but you can use some old windows-machine, too.

Patrick


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