Booting problems: DELL PowerEdge 4400 with PERCRAID

["Stefan Strecker" <stefan.strecker@iw.uni-karlsruhe.de>]

Hi there,

my problem is with the installation of potato using customized boot disks from Kevin Trass (http://www.merilus.com/~kevin/aacraid.html) and Mr. Nokubi (http://www.eal.or.jp/~nokubi/aacraid-disk/).

I boot rescue and root. The PERCRAID is recognized as well as the containers (RAID1 and RAID5) according to dmesg. 

I then use cfdisk to create partitions. Everything works fine. Partition tables are written.

But initializing a partition creates a "Kernel Panic: Inactive in scsi_request_queueable In swapper_task - not syncing". mke2fs writes a number of inodes and then crashes.

My 1st workaround: I used RedHat 7.0 and its disk tool Disk Druid to create the partitions and install a minimal RedHat installation. Interestingly, RedHat writes the file systems without any problem using mke2fs. I then rebott with one of the customized boot disks and "rm -r *" everything just to get a clean partition (remember: I can't use mke2fs from either one of the boot disks). I then install my system from /dev/fd0 according to the hints from Kevin Traas. I insert rescue and all 3 driver floppies and the problem is here again. When trying to install drivers.tgz I get a "Kernel Panic: ..." just like above.

My question is: What am I doind wrong and how can I install Debian 2.2r2 on my system?

Thanks in advance
Stefan