Re: 6.1 install on a PowerEdge 6400 with AMR raid card

On 7. sep. 2006, at 07.20, Eric Kjeldergaard wrote:

> I found this problem on an archive of this list.
> http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.freebsd.current/ 
> browse_thread/thread/c6227c003f6817df/c720a6c7a55c807a% 
> 23c720a6c7a55c807a
>
> This is very similar to the problem I'm having with my 6.1 install.  I
> set up a raid5 on my AMR card (an enterprise 1200 with 4 scsi discs)
> and booted up the installer.  After partitioning the disks and
> labeling, choosing distributions, etc.  I hit commit and it reliably
> stalled after adding part 2/30 from base.  Strange behaviour, I
> thought.
>
> So I got around this by booting up with Freesbie and using that
> sysinstall after changing it to install 6.1-RELEASE but otherwise with
> the same steps all the way through.  It worked well and I rebooted.
> And the OS wouldn't boot (some error regarding LBA).  Trying to boot
> with grub also showed an error of similar sorts.
>
> It came to me that it may be the raid5 that was at fault for the
> booting issues so I quickly (as quickly as one can, at least) set the
> disks up in a raid10 and installed freebsd, but upon trying to do
> mountroot, it hangs leaving a mountroot prompt that cannot be typed
> into.
>
> Are there known issues with the MegaRaid Enterprise 1200 cards for
> booting FreeBSD?  Are the passingly-mentioned patches already in the
> 6.1 tree?  Does anyone have any recommendations of things that can be
> tried before I purchase another RAID card?

Is the RAID controller and disks old of age? I have issues with my  
two MegaRAID Elite 1600 controllres not failing bad disks in two of  
my 4 to 5 year old file servers.

This makes I/O to the array hang whenever the bad parts of the  
failing drive is accessed. I have also seen hangs while shutting down  
when amr tries to flush the cache, and even hangs while the BIOS  
tries to flush the cache after reboot.

After identifying the failing drives and removing them, all these  
problems went away.

You could try to go to Ctrl-M and note down the media error count for  
each disk, attempt the install, go back to Ctr-M and see if any of  
them have increased. (My Elite controllers does not reset the media  
error count for a particular Channel/ID, even if the disk is changed).


I have not had any of these problems with newer amr controllers from  
Intel and DELL, so I guess these problems are only on the old AMI  
MegaRAID Elite and Enterprise series.

--
Frode Nordahl