Installing freeBSD on an Intel RAID5 partition

[Jerry McAllister]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 04:19:02PM -0400, Philip M. Gollucci wrote:

> Jerry McAllister wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 03:35:54PM +0800, nodje wrote:
> > 
> >> I couldn't find any answer to the question.The problem is that the installer
> >> shows up all the disks instead of proposing to install somewhere on the
> >> RAID5 partition, in other words, it just doesn't recognize the RAID5.
> >> Is it possible at all to install freeBSD on one of those RAID??
> >>
> >> I've found out that this is also a problem with the few linux distros I've
> >> tried. I've heard it was possible now but I'm a little bit surprised by the
> >> slow adoption I must say.
> > 
> > I had something look similar to that on a Dell 2950.
> > It put out lots of lines for each separate drive including a device
> > controler name.   But I had to dig through the boot messages carefully
> > to find a device name for the raid controller.  But, it was there.  Once
> > I found it, things went just fine.  I may have done something manually
> > with fdisk or maybe dd to the raid device before getting things to
> > be happy.  I don't remember exactly.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, I had to load Susie 10 Linux on it so I can't look back
> > right now.  It also would have been a Dell Perc something, probably 5.
> > So, the device name might be different from the Intel.
> > 
> > But, keep searching.
> Strange -- I have PowerEdge 1600 with RAID-5 (3disks) installer worked
> just fine.

Yes,  mine worked just fine too -- once I found the device name
somewhat lost in the middle of all the disk device names and info.

////jerry

> 
> FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p5 #0: Thu Jun 28 17:57:32 UTC 2007
> 
> real memory  = 2147418112 (2047 MB)
> avail memory = 2096361472 (1999 MB)
> MPTable: <DELL     PE 011B     >
> FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 2 CPUs
>  cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  1
>  cpu1 (AP): APIC ID:  0
> 
> aacd0: <RAID 5> on aac0
> aacd0: 139997MB (286714368 sectors)
> 
> 
> df
> Filesystem       Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/aacd0s1a    989M     81M    829M     9%    /
> devfs            1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
> /dev/aacd0s1d    1.9G    140K    1.8G     0%    /tmp
> /dev/aacd0s1e    6.8G    1.9G    4.4G    30%    /usr
> /dev/aacd0s1g     24G     67M     22G     0%    /usr/home
> /dev/aacd0s1f     24G    506M     22G     2%    /var
> /dev/aacd0s1h     70G    3.2G     62G     5%    /x1
> devfs            1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /var/named/dev
> 
> This worked out of the box with GENERIC kernel on i386
> 
> Kernel config custom snippets:
> ########## SCSI
> device scbus    # SCSI Subsystem
> device ahc      # AHA2940 and onboard AIC7xxx devices
> device da       # Direct Access (disks)
> device cd       # CD
> device ses      # SCSI Environmental Services (and SAF-TE)
> device aac
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Philip M. Gollucci (philip at ridecharge.com) c:323.219.4708 o:703.749.9295x206
> Senior System Admin - Riderway, Inc.
> http://riderway.com / http://ridecharge.com
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