Topic: Dell 600SC - RAID 1 & Intel Gigabit NIC Problems

[James Shields]

Using a Dell PowerEdge 600SC for a production server. Was using 5.5, but had problems with driver for embedded Intel Gigabit NIC. Upgraded to 5.6, but still needed to manually specify driver. Have I missed something ? I thought 5.6 was going to have drivers to support such NIC's.

Also, have tried software RAID 1, with drives on different channels (both as master), but still takes forever to load. In end, I have revererted back to single disk install which took all of 15 minutes, including configuration. If anybody out there has got software RAID 1 to work on a Dell PowerEdge 600SC server, I would like to hear from you.

James

[James Shields]

Silly me. The driver for Intel Gigabit (e1000.o) is included during install, just not auto-detected. Set it manually, and all working.

I had one of the Hard Drives plugged into the tertiary IDE channel, which only supports ATA-66, whilst the other drive was plugged into primary IDE channel and supports ATA-100. I am not sure this would make much difference (might slow it down), but I am going to try again.

[Charlie Brady]

James Shields wrote:

> Also, have tried software RAID 1, with drives on different
> channels (both as master), but still takes forever to load.

I've seen that once, and was able to tweak DMA settings in the BIOS to get the install to go at normal speed. Try UDMA2 rather than AUTO (or equivalent with the Dell BIOS).

Charlie

[James Shields]

The two hard drives are Western Digital. I have since discovered that jumpers should NOT be set to master, but rather Cable Select or none at all.

Connected hdd1 as primary master, hdd2 as secondary master & cdrom as primary slave. SME 5.6 loaded RAID 1 mirror in about 10 minutes.