Problems installing Solaris 9 on a Mylex 960P
Aurel Bodenmann
I'm trying to install Solaris 9 x86 on a RAID 5 SCSI System (3x9,1GB =
18GB Sys Drive) with a Mylex 960P RAID Controller (Firmware: 2.73). So
far so good, the installation works fine until it comes to the reboot:
the system boots from the drive and then it shows me the screen "Solaris
Boot Sector Version 2" with a blinking prompt and nothing happens.
I've tried various methods, installing with Boot Partition and without,
installing from Installation CD or Software CD1 but all without any success.
Any hints or tricks? I've tried to install Solaris on a Compaq Smart 2SL
Controller but it failed too. After a certain time it panics with "Write
Errors". I'm really looking forward to the day where I can start to work
with Solaris without any problems :)
With kind regards Aurel Bodenmann
Bruce Adler
"Aurel Bodenmann" <psyc...@firemail.de> wrote in message news:3f4e625f$0$242$4d4e...@read.news.ch.uu.net...
> I'm trying to install Solaris 9 x86 on a RAID 5 SCSI System (3x9,1GB =
> 18GB Sys Drive) with a Mylex 960P RAID Controller (Firmware: 2.73).
I assume you meant that you've combined all the physical drives into
a single Sys Drive (rather than divvying up the space into multiple Sys
Drives with the Solaris filesystems on a different volume than the
user-data filesystems).
I think you're going to have 2GB/8GB and/or 1024 cylinder boundary
problems with that configuration. I suggest you try a vanilla (non-RAID)
SCSI controller and use software RAID (Solaris Volume Manager) instead.
OTOH it's entirely possible that your DAC960 problems have absolutely
nothing to do with your disk sizes or geometries. So, you might want to first
try a minimal non-RAID installation on a small disk to check whether
that controller and 18GB Sys Drive even has a chance of working. If you
can't install and boot off of a small physical drive then I don't give
much hope for a large Sys Drive working. And if Solaris won't boot off
a small physical drive, you should check to see whether installing vanilla
DOS on it even works.
That's a very old and obsolete controller (hasn't Sun already announced
its EOL???, that's one driver I wished had been EOL-ed long ago). My
memory about its quirks is pretty faded but I seem to recall that the old
firmware revs don't support booting Sys Drives larger than 2GB and that
even some of the "newer" firmware revs are limited to 8GB. I don't think
the full INT13 large-drive extensions were completely settled till around
1997-98 (which is about the time 9GB SCSI disks first appeared), and most
vendors took a year or two to iron out all their bugs. So in my mind, any
hardware/BIOS/firmware older than about 2000 is suspect as soon as I seen
any mention of booting a drive larger than 8GB (regardless of whether it's
RAID or non-RAID, SCSI or ATA/IDE).
I also vaguely recall that different Mylex firmware revisions also had
limitations on *physical* drive sizes.
Either way, you're very probably screwed unless you keep all the Solaris
system slices below the 2/8GB and 1024-cylinder boundaries. In other words,
you can't ignore those old limitations unless *all* the parts of your
system are new enough to not have any size or geometry bugs. Just because
really huge drives are a lot cheaper and more common, doesn't mean you
can attach and use them on any old piece of PC hardware (not even if
it's SCSI rather than ATA/IDE).
One possible solution might be to install Solaris onto a smaller physical
drive rather than a huge Sys Drive. Or, if the physical drive size isn't
the problem, you could try creating a separate smaller Sys Drive for the
Solaris install and use the rest of the space for a separate Sys Drive for
user-data filesystems. That's assuming you can even still find enough
Mylex information to figure out whether physical drives larger than 8GB
can even work correctly on your DAC960.
Also, since you seem to be re-using ancient hardware, is it possible you're
also trying to use an motherboard with an ancient BIOS rev that (almost
certainly) also has large-disk size and geometry problems? I no longer
remember exactly how the motherboard BIOS and Mylex firmware interact in
that situation but it seems logical to me that to boot off a large drive
that you would need large drive support in both.
One possible workaround/test to try is booting from a DCA floppy (or
even the "CD 1 of 2" CDROM) and then selecting your RAID LU from
that DCA menu (instead of the CDROM). That boot method should be able
to bypass firmware and BIOS disk size/geometry limitations. If the
RAID LU doesn't show up on that boot menu, then you've got something
fundamentally wrong (like perhaps a motherboard versus controller
hardware conflict; my vague recollection is that the DAC960s didn't
always work on all motherboards).
C. Newport
You cannot boot from a RAID unless it is a standalone system which
looks like a single disk to the system BEFORE BOOT.
Internal and software RAID systems need to load a driver which means
that your BIOS cannot understand it.
Bruce Adler
"Aurel Bodenmann" <psyc...@firemail.de> wrote in message news:3f4e625f$0$242$4d4e...@read.news.ch.uu.net...
> I've tried various methods, installing with Boot Partition and without,
> installing from Installation CD or Software CD1 but all without any success.
One more thing I just remembered. Running partial or incomplete installs
on a disk tends to confuse the installer. Sometimes it decides you've got
a valid bootstrap or boot slice on the disk when you don't and it skips
installing part of the boot code (or tries to do an "upgrade" rather
than an "full install"). You shouldn't attempt installing on top of a
non-working or incomplete install (especially if you're using
WebStart/Installation CD). Between attempts you need to zero the
fdisk partition table entries and/or zero the first 4k of the Solaris x86
and Solaris Boot partitions. That's the only way I know to be certain
that the installer program is going to do a full install and not try
to "optimize" out any steps. Otherwise it does silly stuff like fsck-ing
and mounting the old partition before it even asks you whether you
want to do an install or an upgrade, and even if you choose "install"
it does things slightly differently than what it does on a virgin disk.
Bruce Adler
"C. Newport" <c...@NOSPAM.netunix.com> wrote in message news:2150784.Nfnbl6eUW5@callisto...
> ...
> You cannot boot from a RAID unless it is a standalone system which
> looks like a single disk to the system BEFORE BOOT.
> Internal and software RAID systems need to load a driver which means
> that your BIOS cannot understand it.
That's neither completely correct nor relevant to this situation.
All the current hardware RAID controllers I've seen have a BIOS chip
which supports INT13 and allows booting from any logical volume
(regardless of how many logical volumes are defined or how many
physical disks are allocated to each volume). In other words, one of
the reasons why these RAID controllers have BIOS chips is specifically
to support booting a logical volume.
Contrary to what you've said, it's not during the initial boot phases
that a driver is needed, rather it's exactly at the point where the BIOS
is finished that a *kernel* driver needs to be available.
I've no idea what you mean by "internal RAID system", but the
DAC960 is in fact a hardware RAID controller that provides (some
level of) BIOS support. So you're comment about software RAID
versus BIOS problems isn't relevant. It's also incorrect for in
at least two situations that I know of:
software RAID-1 (mirrored) volumes, and
software IDE-RAID controllers (that are nothing more than
the BIOS code and a dumb controller)
Both of these *software* RAID configurations boot just fine (and
require a *kernel* driver just like a *hardware* RAID configuration,
so you've pointed out a distinction that isn't correct or relevant).
My suspicion is that the problem with the DAC960 isn't that they don't
support booting from a logical volume, but rather that the version in
question (or the motherboard BIOS) is so out of date that it doesn't
support the drives that are available today. In other words, if you're
going to use a six-year-old controller there's a good chance you might
be stuck using six-year-old or older disk drives.
Aurel Bodenmann
Thank you very much for your very detailed illustration. I know that the
Mylex 960P(L) is an elder controller but that's in fact the reason why I
bought it. I thought that because of its age it should be well supported
under any OS available, but obviously I'm wrong. But anyway, I'm not so
sure about using Solaris anymore because I've read somewhere that the
biggest partition size possible is 1TB and since I'm planning to build a
fileserver with more than 1 TB this would be a very annoying limitation.
But what I've figured out in the meantime is that my other controller -
a Compaq Smart 2-SL - works fine under Solaris 9 when I'm using a RAID 1
Array instead of a RAID 5 Array.
The Solution with installing Solaris on a little Disk is a good idea,
but since I bought that RAID I also would like to use it :) The
Mainboard shouldn't be a problem, it's a Intel PESV845 with the newest
BIOS installed and everything worked fine so far (I used to have Win 2k
installed and it booted without any problems). About the Update problem:
I've erased the whole Disk after every (failed) installation including
the MBR.
Barry OGrady
I have three of those DAC960 cards and I'm going to bin them.
I had a play around with one and I can relate to your comments.
The advice given to me and which I would like to pass on is to use
a newer card.
=-=-=
Barry
http://members.iinet.net.au/~barry.og