[plug] Serveraid 3L controller and Redhat 5.2

[Christian]

Garth Atkinson wrote:
> Can the boot disk that redhat 5.2 uses at installation time be updated
> with IBM serveraid support?
> I have to stay with that version of redhat unfortunately and it does not
> detect the 3L card (and so does not find any disk space) !!!!!
> Or can I modify the boot disk to use a newer kernel version of linux and
> still install 5.2 ?

This may not be any help for you but a few months ago I was in a similar
situation to you in installing/configuring a Debian system running the
COMPAQ SmartARRAY RAID card on all of it's hard disks.  While Red Hat
6.1 supported the hardware out of the box (including the required
patched LILO), Debian 2.1 didn't support the hardware on any level.  In
the end the job was a rigmarole but I was never really worried that it
wouldn't work.  The machine is now running very nicely and enjoying all
the benefits of Debian. :-)  My advice to you would be to get an old IDE
disk, plug it in and install onto that, compile kernel support for the
hardware, upgrade the required packages then make the filesystems on the
array, mount them, copy them across, patch LILO if required,
re-configure LILO (tricky, read the manual page carefully...), take the
IDE disk out and reboot.  It works but you have to know what you're
doing.  Good luck and if I can be of any more help then let me know.

Regards,

Christian.