[SOLVED] Fedora17 Install does not detect 3ware 7006-2 hardware RAID controller

onedude · #1 13th October 2012, 05:43 AM

Howdy,

I have a 3ware Escalade 7006-2 hardware RAID PCI card configured as a mirror. I have successfully installed both Windows XP and Windows7 on this RAID in the exact same machine. At one point I even had a dual boot with FreeBSD and Windows XP installed on this RAID.

I'm trying to install Fedora17 on this RAID and the installer is not detecting the PCI card at all. The GUI installer indicates that there are no drives on which I may install the OS.

I did a little digging and it appears that the 3w-xxxx kernel module is not being loaded: when the installer GUI starts, I switch over to the terminal and run lsmod and the 3w-xxxx kernel module is not listed. I can run 'modprobe 3w_xxxx' and observe that the 3w-xxxx kernel module is loaded by checking the output of lsmod and dmesg. I'm not sure where to go from here.

Does anyone know a way to work around this? Can I direct the system to probe for new hardware a second time after manually loading the 3w-xxxx kernel module? Would that even work?

More Detail: The boot screen for the RAID card shows:
Firmware version: 1.05.00.068
BIOS version: 1.08.00.048

Thanks,
onedude

Seve · #2 14th October 2012, 03:16 AM

The kernel recognizes the following, by default:

PHP Code:


			
[root@larissa ~]# dmraid -l

asr     : Adaptec HostRAID ASR (0,1,10)

ddf1    : SNIA DDF1 (0,1,4,5,linear)

hpt37x  : Highpoint HPT37X (S,0,1,10,01)

hpt45x  : Highpoint HPT45X (S,0,1,10)

isw     : Intel Software RAID (0,1,5,01)

jmicron : JMicron ATARAID (S,0,1)

lsi     : LSI Logic MegaRAID (0,1,10)

nvidia  : NVidia RAID (S,0,1,10,5)

pdc     : Promise FastTrack (S,0,1,10)

sil     : Silicon Image(tm) Medley(tm) (0,1,10)

via     : VIA Software RAID (S,0,1,10)

dos     : DOS partitions on SW RAIDs

[root@larissa ~]#

I believe you will need to have the drivers available at time of installation for your card and go from there. I believe 3ware and most others provide good support for linux and their hardware raid controllers.

The Installation instructions will help: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...ide/index.html

batmanonfire · #3 14th October 2012, 04:12 AM

This is my first post on forums.so please excuse me if I'm on wrong place.
I installed fedora 17 i686 on my laptop successfully.but I failed to do the same on my friend's.
the problem is fedora detects only the c drive of the machine(where w7 is).[COLOR="rgb(255, 140, 0)"][/COLOR] so I tried to install on that,but it finds an unknown bug/error (with a picture of broken monitor ) and reboots.
Note : hard disk had enough free space(>15GB) on c and d drives.
thanks.

onedude · #4 14th October 2012, 06:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seve

The kernel recognizes the following, by default:

PHP Code:


			
[root@larissa ~]# dmraid -l

asr     : Adaptec HostRAID ASR (0,1,10)

ddf1    : SNIA DDF1 (0,1,4,5,linear)

hpt37x  : Highpoint HPT37X (S,0,1,10,01)

hpt45x  : Highpoint HPT45X (S,0,1,10)

isw     : Intel Software RAID (0,1,5,01)

jmicron : JMicron ATARAID (S,0,1)

lsi     : LSI Logic MegaRAID (0,1,10)

nvidia  : NVidia RAID (S,0,1,10,5)

pdc     : Promise FastTrack (S,0,1,10)

sil     : Silicon Image(tm) Medley(tm) (0,1,10)

via     : VIA Software RAID (S,0,1,10)

dos     : DOS partitions on SW RAIDs

[root@larissa ~]#

I believe you will need to have the drivers available at time of installation for your card and go from there. I believe 3ware and most others provide good support for linux and their hardware raid controllers.

The Installation instructions will help: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...ide/index.html

Thanks for your reply, Seve.

The problem that I'm having is that the installer never asks me to supply a driver disk for my hardware. When I get to the storage devices screen and click "Next", the installer searches for storage devices and comes back with a dialog saying, "No disks found. No usable disks have been found". This dialog has two buttons: "Back" and "Exit Installer".

dmraid appears to be a software RAID tool. The 3ware 7006 is a full on hardware RAID card. Given that, does the output of "dmraid -l" still matter here?

Why would the installer flat out fail to detect my hardware? Is the problem simply that the 3w_xxxx kernel module is not loaded by default? I haven't seen a way to specify loading of a particular kernel module on the boot line. Is there a way to do that?

Thanks,
onedude

george_toolan · #5 14th October 2012, 10:42 AM

If you use the Fedora installation DVD you can just switch to a different VC by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then load the driver manually.

@batman: Linux doesn't have no C or D drives. You're going to need some free space which is not used by any of the windows "drives".

onedude · #6 14th October 2012, 03:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by george_toolan

If you use the Fedora installation DVD you can just switch to a different VC by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then load the driver manually.

Thanks for the tip, george_toolan, but using [CTRL+ALT+F2] is exactly how I'm able to get a console with which to run things like lsmod, modprobe, etc. The problem that I think I'm having is that whatever component is responsible for discovering hardware is failing to discover my RAID card. I've already tried manually loading the driver with modprobe, then switching back to the GUI to no avail.

Can anyone tell me what component is responsible for discovering hardware? Any tips on how to debug it?

Thanks,
onedude

onedude · #7 14th October 2012, 06:38 PM

I gathered the output of lsmod, lspci, modprobe -c, and dmesg after booting off of the installer DVD and switching over to the CTRL+ALT+F2 console. Each are attached in a .txt file. Does this help?

Thanks,
onedude

george_toolan · #8 15th October 2012, 11:27 AM

What happens when you load the module?

I just get this since I don't have the card:

Code:

3ware Storage Controller device driver for Linux v1.26.02.003.

And why are you trying to use an old pci card in a modern computer?

onedude · #9 15th October 2012, 02:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by george_toolan

What happens when you load the module?

I just get this since I don't have the card:

Code:

3ware Storage Controller device driver for Linux v1.26.02.003.

That's exactly the same thing I get in the output of dmesg, with nothing else following it. It's as if loading the driver after the kernel has probed everything doesn't cause a re-probing of the hardware.

Quote:

Originally Posted by george_toolan

And why are you trying to use an old pci card in a modern computer?

The 3ware 7006 is a great, low cost, fully-hardware RAID1 solution. I've had this unit for years, and when a drive goes bad, it's so easy to just buy another, pop it in, and rebuild the RAID. You can even be comfortable buying and using less expensive, used drives and not having to worry so much. This PCI card still works with Windows7, mind you.

Thanks,
onedude

onedude · #10 19th October 2012, 05:03 AM

Here is the output of dmidecode for the PCI slot in use:

Code:

Handle 0x0023, DMI type 9, 17 bytes
System Slot Information
	Designation: PCI Slot
	Type: 32-bit PCI
	Current Usage: In Use
	Length: Short
	ID: 4
	Characteristics:
		3.3 V is provided
		Opening is shared
		PME signal is supported
	Bus Address: 0000:00:1e.0

This address (0000:00:1e.0) shows up a few times in dmesg:

Code:

...
[    0.119527] pci 0000:00:1e.0: [8086:244e] type 1 class 0x000604
...
[    0.126225] pci 0000:00:1e.0: PCI bridge to [bus 20-08] (subtractive decode)
[    0.126374] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [io  0xb000-0xbfff]
[    0.126377] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [mem 0xeb800000-0xec0fffff]
[    0.126383] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [io  0x0000-0x0cf7] (subtractive decode)
[    0.126385] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [io  0x0d00-0xffff] (subtractive decode)
[    0.126388] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [mem 0x000a0000-0x000bffff] (subtractive decode)
[    0.126390] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [mem 0xe0000000-0xffffffff] (subtractive decode)
...
[    0.173705] pci 0000:00:1e.0: PCI bridge to [bus 20-08]
[    0.173852] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [io  0xb000-0xbfff]
[    0.174011] pci 0000:00:1e.0:   bridge window [mem 0xeb800000-0xec0fffff]
[    0.174214] pci 0000:00:1e.0: setting latency timer to 64
...

Also, my mobo is an Intel DP43BF. I see some posts on other forums where linux fails to detect conventional PCI devices on this motherboard, period.

ashram · #11 19th October 2012, 05:14 AM

I am by no means an expert on installing Fedora, but have had some similar problems recently. Have you tried selecting the "specialized storage devices" option during installation?

onedude · #12 19th October 2012, 06:27 AM

Yea, I tried the "specialized storage devices" option and it doesn't show any drives.

---------- Post added at 09:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:25 PM ----------

From another forum:

Quote:

On 09/24/2010 05:29 PM, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:54:45 -0400
> "Brian C. Huffman"<bhuffman [at] graze> wrote:
>
>> I have searched and found no previous posts on this topic. Using the
>> 2.6.36-rc2-git3 (and many before that rev), the kernel doesn't see my
>> PCI devices. They can be seen with dmidecode but do not show up with
>> lspci (and are not mentioned on boot up).
> Is this still happening?
>
> Do you know when it started happening? Was 2.6.35 OK? 2.6.34?
>
Thanks.

Unfortunately I no longer have this board to help test. I posted the
same message on the linux-pci list and we got so far as to determine
that somehow the kernel is getting the wrong primary / secondary bus
number. Using pci=assign-busses worked around it, but even after
recognizing the cards, they didn't work properly and I had to send the
board back. Here's the pertinent excerpt from linux-pci:

On 09/10/2010 02:38 PM, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
>
>> pci 0000:00:1e.0: PCI bridge to [bus 20-08] (subtractive decode)
> There's something wrong here because the [20-08] bus number range is
> backwards. Maybe the secondary bus is really 08, but we scan bus 20
> instead?
>
> The "pci=assign-busses" parameter might work around this for now.
> Maybe Windows is smart enough to notice this problem and reprogram
> the bridge to something sensible automatically.

I tried "pci=assign-busses" on the boot line and the installer has successfully detected my RAID controller!

---------- Post added at 10:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:37 PM ----------

The install succeeded and I was able to boot from the RAID controller.

Hopefully this saves another DP43BF owner some headache.

Thanks everyone.