Topic: Compaq Proliant 1500

[Rob]

I have a few compaq proliant servers that have been given to me, and im trying to get e-smith 4,12 or mitel up and running on them.
E-smtih doesnt appear to detect the "smart array controllers" that the compaq servers are running. On installation an error message appears "no valid media available". Any ideas??????

[Barry Fitzmaurice]

Have you set up the drive array using SmartStart??  If not, then there are no logical disks to install it on.  If you have, then try a later version, version 5.6 definately works, although even Red Hat 6.1 recognises the Compaq array controllers, so your version of e-smith should be OK.

Barry

[rob]

Barry,
Unfortunally I havnt got acces to an original smartdrive cd.
But i have downloaded all the available programs from the compaq site, i.e. system erase configuration and the drive array configurer. (sorry about the spelling its been a long day!!!)
At startup is shows i have 1 logical drive present.

[dave]

I'm running a compaq array controller in a non compaq server, it's a 2/P card, and it works fine.  I had to go through some effort to create the array but it looks like you've already got that done (with it saying 1 logical array at boot).  I'm running SME 5.5 and it installed with no problems, once I had the array properly set up.

[Barry Fitzmaurice]

If you have a logical drive, then it sounds like the array is set up.  I don't have your version of e-smith, just the downloaded 5.6 which includes the compaq driver.

Barry

[rob]

Barry,

Ta I'll give it a go!!!!
Latest update, i've got e-smith to half load on a system with all the disks set up on raid0. This one was a proliant 1500 with pci scsi card.
It gave an error message during install about not being able to mount md2 for the swap partition.

Rob

[Brent]

Rob,

I'm in the same boat.  I just bought a used Proliant 6500 with no RAID controller.  I put 5 hot swap 4.3GB SCSI drives in it and had to purchase separately a SmartArray 221 RAID controller (PCI.)  I'm trying to install 6.0b2.

My Proliant detects the 221 at boot, but I cannot configure the RAID5 array without the SmartStart CD - none of the downloadable utilities worked.  I had to purchase a copy of the CD from Compaq - $21 US (plus $20 US to ship to Canada via USPS standard - Unbelievable!!)  I think Compaq should have these CDs available as ISO images from their website.  It's annoying as hell to have to wait 7 - 10 days for it to arrive in the mail (and they won't expedite shipping, either.)

Since my CD hasn't arrived yet, I'm unable to determine whether or not this is going to work fine.  In theory, once you set up your hardware RAID, you perform the SME installation for a single disk, and the hardware controller will do the rest.  I don't believe that SME has anything to do with it if you're installing a hardware RAID.

For now, my startup shows that I have 1 logical drive configured, but also says there are no fixed disks. I'll try to update once I get the SmartStart CD.  Oh, and if you order the CD, be very careful about which version you order - not all versions work with all models.  I had to specify version 5.5 (as opposed to 6.x, which is their most current.)