FC3 / Adaptec SCSI: installer can't see hard disk

[jliechty]

I have a dell poweredge sc 1425 with a single scsi drive attached to (dell's oem?) adaptec 39320 raid card. Fedora's installer doesn't recognize the controller/hard disk and so the install fails with a 'no valid hard drives found' error. I've tried to manually feed it several versions of the aic97xx drivers, but the installer doesn't consider them a match to the hardware. I've seen several mentions of this problem in differnent forums, but haven't yet found a solution that I can make work. Anybody run into this and get past it? I'm installing from the standard FC3 iso's.
Thanks!
John

[huw-l]

Is this the dodgy Dell branded scsi RAID card? If so go into the BIOS and turn off the RAID functionality. The OS should then see the drives fine.

[jliechty]

It is a dell raid card. I've looked in the system bios and in the adaptec scsi-select config utility and I don't see the option of disabling raid in either location. It's a pci card, so I'm not sure that the system bios would have any say in the adaptec cards configuration. If we're still talking about the same raid hardware card, could you be more specific about where to disable the raid functionality?
thanks!

[Dr_Strangelove]

If this is a plug-in PCI card then you won't find it in the system (motherboard) BIOS. You need to go into the SCSI card BIOS. Reboot the computer and press the CTRL+A keys. That should get you into the SCSI card BIOS. I don't have the same card that you have but thats the way you do it on an Adaptec -2940UW anyway.

[jliechty]

Yup, I knew about ctrl-a to get into the scsi utility. None of the changes made there had any impact on this problem (raid 0, raid 1, jbod, etc...). I talked with a Dell linux tech today and they didn't have any secret, unreleased drivers or anything, so I was pretty much on my own. I've tried most of the drivers on adaptec's site that are designed for RHEL 3 and didn't get anywhere with those either. Finally, I just pulled down FC4 Test3 and (whohoo!) the installer is recognizing my scsi drives with no problems, so I'm just going to sit tight until FC4 is released and install it when it's available. Thanks for everyone's help.

[Almuric]

The driver is the aic-79xx driver.

You might have tried "modprove aic79xx " to see if it would work that way
(you can then put the module into the correct file in the initrd image, to instruct it to load that module at boot time..
or use the sysconfig menus, if you can find the correct place to add it )

[JohnVV]

Almuric PLEASE Do not drag up 3 year old posts and answer them !!

[glennzo]

Thread closed.