I had problems trying to install SCO OpenServer 6 on a PC with no floppy drive and a SATA CD drive.
Eventually after advice received on this forum last week, I adopted a different approach by fitting the LSI HBA RAID adapter and associated disks into an older PC that does have CD and floppy drives.
I then installed the megasys (LIS) driver during the install and all went fine installing onto the RAID.
After successful installation I moved the RAID card and disks back into the supermicro Server to find that it doesn't boot properly and gets stuck.
Essentially it displays the SCO logo and boots to the Boot prompt, then proceeds to boot up normally up until it say 'System is booting up please wait (or words to that effect) then shows that it's loading the LSI driver with :-
Notice megasas 00.00.03.05 Oct 2 2006 followed by
0:0,127,0: HBA : (megasys,1) LSI MegaRAID 3.01
and does not proceed any further. Hangs!
I am guessing that either the Kernel doesn't like the new hardware in someway, and think that it may be to do either with different disk geometry or the fact the the RAID card is in a 'different' PCI slot / and therefore bus address.
Inspecting the disk geometry at the boot prompt shows HDPARM0 having the values 1023,255,63 which I believe were the values on the old PC used to install from.
Could it be that running on the new supermicro PC the Bios/RAID card is presenting different geometry and if so how can I find out what geometry is being presented so I can tweak SCO to use the correct geometry?
Several possibilities:
Do the logical drives still show normal status?
How long did you wait before deciding that the machine was not going to boot. Rebuilding the kernel for new hardware can take 10 minutes or more.
The CMOS settings have no effect on SCSI drives.
What is the state of the OS installation as far as patches?
Hi jgt,
Thanks for your reply.
I did not wait more than 10 minutes - so will do that now!
Logical drives are fine. If I switch the card back to the server I installed from it boots fine again.
No patches have been installed on OS as yet though I have MP4 available. I'll install that from the intall PC and try again.
Many thanks. Will let you know how I get on.
Andy
---------- Post updated at 11:47 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:21 AM ----------
Hi again
Waited 30 minutes for it to boot. No disk (or any other discernible) activity throughout.
Currently using old install PC to install MP4. will retry connection to 'live' server when MP4 installed.
Hi
only 4gb installed.
As soon as it reaches the message '0:0,127,0 : HBA : (megasas, 1) LSI MegaRAID3..' it stops and there is no more disk activity.
When installed on the old install PC the messages immediately after this one are the ID's of the two disks in the RAID, and controller itself. So it seems to me that it is not recognising the RAID properly.
Strange given that it has at this point loaded the operating system and partially booted off the RAID to then not see it properly.
MP4 still installing... will retry when done.
---------- Post updated at 12:51 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:01 PM ----------
Hi Jgt
thanks for your advice re MP4. This has fixed it. The disks now boot properly when fitted to the Supermicro target machine. What a performance!