Topic: Installing Compaq Smart 2/P RAID card and Linux utilities

[prob]

Hi team

I am building up a e-smith 5.6 server. I have the above card. I have set up raid on it plugged into a windows pc and hopefully e-smith will come up OK in the new box.

Compaq have a variety of linux utilities for their raid cards which get installed on a small partition.  As esmith repartitions the drive it installs on, any suggestions on how to install the compaq utilities?

regards

[Chaloner Hale]

I was not aware that the current version of the utilities can be installed on the Compaq partition.

Yes, the older versions installed there, but I do believe the newer ones do not. In any event, I once thought I needed this partition as well, but in fact, it is simply not needed.

If you need to fool around with the raid utilities, it is far easier to have a recent copy of SmartStart laying around and use it when necessary.

To summarize,

Forget about it and use SmartStart.

Chaloner Hale

[prob]

The problem is the smartstart System Configuration Utility won't run as it expects a real compaq server with EISA bus etc and not my PIII 133 clone. It comes up with a message saying I need a ISA version of SCU.

So, if I can't boot to a CD or floppy to manage the array, I need to put the linux tools somewhere.

[dave]

I went the long way around to set mine up.  I found a old small IDE (800 meg I think) drive and installed Windows 2000 on it.  Then I added the 2/P card and the drives I wanted to use, next boot up Win2K found and loaded the default drivers for the card.  Next I installed the compaq specific utilities that allowed me to create and format the array.  Then I unplugged the IDE drive (but left it in the chassis should I ever need to reconfig), booted the SME CD and installed to the compaq array as a single drive installation.  

You may be able to substitute Win95 or Win98 as the OS. It's a pain to set up but it works like a champ.  

I have no way of monitoring current array status but if you can see all the lights on the all drives flashing with a console access you can be pretty sure you haven't dropped a drive.  If there's any question, a reboot with a power down will show any major errors during the array initialization phase on startup.

As an alternative, you may be able to find a floppy or CD bootable array configuration utility on the compaq site.