Brandon said:
Per my previous posting, I didn't say Dell had the instructions for
performing this type of install. And, the SATA drives on my machine are
being managed by a SAS Host Adapter/Controller, which is what the driver on
the floppy is for, not the SATA drives themselves. The bottom line here is
that the XP CD cannot seem to communicate with the SAS host adapter even
though it is successfully being read from the floppy after hitting F6.
The info I found with regards to downloading the driver onto a floppy was on
Experts-Exchange.com. Do a search in the knowledgebase with "Problem
Installing Windows XP in Dell Precision 690 already with Windows XP x64"
To start with, the references to it, mention "SAS-RAID". Which
implies there could be other issues.
*******
WinXP 32 bit
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/SAS-RAID/R193679.txt
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/SAS-RAID/R193679.exe (extract, copy to floppy diskette)
WinXP 64 bit
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/SAS-RAID/R193680.txt
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/SAS-RAID/R193680.exe (extract, copy to floppy diskette)
*******
The text file gives installation information in each case.
According to this, you "Press <Ctrl><C> during POST" to enter the
RAID BIOS screen. Since the T7400 has two possible RAID solutions
(RAID via SATA and Southbridge, or RAID via SAS controller), I would
have expected two different options to be offered. It is hard
to believe both are accessed via the same key combination.
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/wsT7400/en/UG/html/advfeat.htm
In order for a computer to boot from a disk which is not connected
to the Southbridge, an "Extended INT 0x13" routine is needed. Add
in cards, for example, have a BIOS chip on board, and one of the things
it contains, is a INT 0x13 to load during POST. That is how the
booting process gets its "driver" to access the disk. If the BIOS
has been set to not "capture" such an add-on BIOS chip, then the
magic key press (like control-c mentioned above) won't work. So there
are some things you can bugger up in the BIOS, that will leave
you wondering what is going on.
Some RAID controllers, will treat uninitialized disks as accessible
volumes. In years past, for controllers that did not do that, a
cheat was to declare a single disk as a "striped RAID0 volume consisting
of one drive". That was a workaround. But controller design has
progressed a bit, and perhaps that kind of trivia is no longer
required to set things up. (I find this uniformly poorly documented,
after looking at eight or more RAID implementations. They *never* tell
you in plain English, when a single drive will work without a fuss.)
To summarize, this is not nearly as simple as getting a drive
on the Southbridge running. Depending on the hardware provided,
and its location, there can be more to it than meets the eye.
The SAS controller can be soldered to the motherboard (like on
Asus P6T family), or can be on a separate card. Some controllers
are "dumb" and consist of a single chip which provides bare access
to the drive. The software drivers and firmware provide a "soft raid".
Other controllers will feature an IOP (for example, a processor from
Intel with XOR capability), and that is an intelligent controller.
The XOR capability makes for less load when computing the parity
info on a RAID 5. The design may feature a cache DIMM as well,
which improves RAID performance. When such a piece of hardware
is used for a RAID0 stripe, the IOP doesn't buy anything, except to
get in the way. But is an important component, when a parity
is involved, such as on RAID5.
You'd think they would have thrown in a manual for the SAS
controller, to at least make it possible for you to bootstrap
the process. Expecting people to discover the recipe by
osmosis, is stretching things. I'm not impressed with the
level of detail I'm finding on the Dell site. I hope the
cardboard box the system came in, has nice printed manuals
containing more info.
This is a picture of the Perc6/i. The item on the left could
be battery backup. Cache is 256MB soldered to the card. Apparently
this form factor has something to do with hot swap (being able
to pull the card and replace it) ?
http://snpi.dell.com/sna/images/products/large/341-6064.jpg
It needs some kind of cabling adapter, to connect to the drive. Perhaps
similar to this. The Dell documentation seems to ignore this,
so I presume it was thrown into the cardboard box.
http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/6ED0837F-7625-43F5-B142-F459081A749D/0/2247500R.jpg
Now, using a forum post from over on 2cpu.com, Dell could be
using the same hardware on their Perc6/i, as this thing. The
single big chip contains a 500MHz processor, a PowerPC (so it
isn't Intel this time).
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/pro.../megaraid_sas/megaraid_sas_8888elp/index.html
LSI has documentation, if you click the Documentation tab.
http://www.lsi.com/DistributionSyst...storage_stand_prod/sas/mr_sas_8888ELP_qig.pdf
The LSI documentation mentions pressing <Ctrl><H>. So far,
I'm not seeing anything helpful in that documentation for
using one disk. I presume it'll still give you some
functionality with one drive running as a "spare", not
part of an array. The BIOS screen shown with the
<Ctrl><H> would show you the array configuration, and
the list of spare drives if any. Don't "make an array",
until you've exhausted all other options.
The ID information here, says the LSI controller VEN/DEV
would be VEN 1000 DEV 0062. So if you happen to be booted
in some other environment (like a Linux LiveCD, using
"lspci" utility after bootup), you can verify whether the PERC6/i
is an actual LSI product. I suppose Dell has some way to
hack these numbers, so something different shows up.
http://pciids.sourceforge.net/pci.ids
1000 LSI Logic / Symbios Logic (which is why the driver mentioned "sym")
0062 SAS1078 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS
I understand the Dell BIOS screens, also have a way of displaying
the hardware present in the computer. Which is another way
you could view the world. The nice thing about the
Linux LiveCD (I use Knoppix from knopper.net), is it
gives the raw numbers so you can look them up in files
like the pci.ids file.
So, a miracle could happen. You could copy the files in the
Dell download, to a floppy, press F6 during the install, and
it all "just works". But my gut reaction is, you've got some
other screens to visit first. And some reading to do.
I wouldn't be happy, until I'd at least succeeded in
seeing the Perc6/i config screen in the BIOS.
For further fun, it is mentioned here, that you can flash
the firmware for the 8888ELP, into the Perc6/i. I guess that
is for people with time on their hands
http://forums.2cpu.com/archive/index.php/t-91446.html
Good luck,
Paul
