Hi all,tried the install again and I might have a working solution. Note the word might, I have not been able to fully test the install and strange things may happen with constant usage. Again I used the 2.2.18 kernel recompiled with only scsi, AMI Megaraid card and I2O support, also compiled was smp and all other drivers recommended for a rescue disk. One change made to the kernel code was to uncrease the scsi timeout value in kernel-source-2.2.18/drivers/scsi/sd.c from
#define SD_MOD_TIMEOUT (30 * HZ) to #define SD_MOD_TIMEOUT (75 * HZ)The controller was reset to raid 5 and drives initialised and formated before the install was attempted. The new kernel worked without any hitches and I did not spot any unusual kernel messages, though at times the machine seemed to pause for longish periods with the disks going hard when making the file system. The firmware, machine bios and raid controller bios were not updated all are at orignal versions (firmware UC77, BIOS A01, Megaraid 1.47). I did not get a chance to test the patches sent by Tom and will not get the chance to either as the new drives have arrived and the server will be back in production as a NWare box. I did try a recue disk based on Dell's RH kernel but it did not work for me, possibly because I did not try to hard to get it working anyway.
So thank for all the help William tom@tomd.org wrote:
Just FYI, I followed AMI's advice and loaded the latest firmware available from Dell's site (3.13), and now the beta driver works like a charm. I did not try it with the stock 2.2.18 driver to see if it was just the firmware that was the problem or not. Anyway, you might want to try upgrading your firmware and seeing if that helps. Tom