I am using an old IBM system x3650 server with 2 cpus 24(ithink)gb of ram and 4 146gb sas drives installed and when trying to install ipfire via cd everything works up until it needs to install on the hdd and it says no hard drive found. The drives are running through a ibm serveRAID 8k-l controller and the controller config is showing all 4 drives, drive 2,3 are set up togeather as an array but not 0,1.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advanced
Hi Will.
I don’t think it will work for you in RAID. I would not complicate it and if the Server has a SATA connector, directly use it.
Maybe someone with more knowledge in these matters can help you better than me.
Greetings.
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Linux does not support hardware RAID, such as you are trying to use. You would need to:
- disable RAID in the server’s BIOS
- possibly also need to remove any RAID signature from each HDD.
The latter can require more than zero-ing. Windows tool “Disk Management” can be used to delete all existing partitions then restore a drive to factory defaults, removing RAID signature.
SAS can work in Linux and therefore in IPFire. It does with HP Microservers, which are specifically designed for compatibility with Red Hat. Much would depend on the native OS for the IBM system x3650.
Linux has problems with “fake” hardware raid which creates raid using firmware in the MB BIOS. It’s really a form of software raid.
@shadowraven is using a Raid controller card to give real hardware raid. That can be used by Linux but only if the specific drivers created for that controller are available as they make the drives look like standard SCSI drives to the system.
I suspect the problem here is that the drivers required by the ibm serveRAID 8k-l controller are not available in the IPFire Linux kernel and you can’t just install the required drivers due to the signed nature of the IPFire kernel to ensure security.
You would have to do a full IPFire build including the kernel with extra drivers and then install the IPFire iso created by that build process.
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Thanks heaps guys for the help, so an update foursome reason all the drive arrays got deleted and that was the reason why ipfire couldn’t see any drives. So I got it all working and then like an hour later the whole server just died(I think it’s the board) the other server I bought (x3650 m2) arrived and have installed ipfire on that without any issues in the red+green+blue+orange network config and everything seems to be taking along nicely with an ambient temp of 26°c inside of the server with no errors at all.
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