Topic: Dell Poweredge 600sc will not raid

[Dave Woodhouse]

Help I'm stuck!

Just bought a spanking new Dell Poweredge 600SC to replace 'old faithful', tried to install SME 5.5 with RAID 1 support (onto identical 40GB IDE drives) and keep getting the following error:

Error creating swap on device md2

followed by

Error mounting md1: invalid argument

I then have to hose the drives down before I can try again.

I can install onto a single disk OK.
I have tried both drives on the primary controller and on seperate controllers.
Anyone else come across this problem and found a solution?

regards

Dave

[Michael Smith]

Dell servers tend to be fussy about using Cable Select for master/slave selection, as in, they want it.  Are both drives masters?  Can you install on EITHER drive, i.e. perhaps one drive is faulty? You might also try the drive maker's utility disk to see if both drives truly have identical geometry.  I recently did one of these little servers w/twin 80 GB drives and all was bliss once I remembered the cable select thing ... I prefer to explicitly set jumpers but these Dell servers don't like it.

[Dave]

Thanks for replying Michael, pulled the drives out and they are both on "cable select". I can load onto either drive in single disk i.e. non-raid mode fine.
Also, just downloaded and tried 5.6 beta 7 and it loaded as a raid straight off!!
I'm now downloading another copy of 5.5 in case mine is glitched...

Thanks again for the suggestion.

Dave

[James Shields]

Dave,

I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge 600SC for exactly the same reason (replace old faithful). I also have dual 40GB Hard Drives. I installed SME 5.5 first go, with no problems. On re-boot however, I discovered I have to choose "e-smith up" rather than "e-smith" for everything to work correctly.

Otherwise, it appears to be working just fine.

James

[Dave Woodhouse]

Hi James,

Thanks for the reply, I have 'solved' my problem!
It turned out to be a dodgy downloaded ISO image, I went back and checked the checksum and it was wrong (I know, I should have checked it first time before I burned a CD), so I downloaded another (this time using proper FTP software, not IE6) and the checksum was correct and the install worked first time!!

Your issue is a know problem with single processor socket 478 systems, I had the same problem. Check out Darrell May's howto's at

http://myezserver.com/downloads/mitel/howto/esmith-up_lilo.conf-howto.html

Dave