[Linux-aus] Hardware problems

[Adam Nielsen]

> Problem is I have a LSI hardware raid card. Its branded DELL Perc
> H310. I have whitebox desktop.

I'd suggest the Dell Linux list:

  https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge

It says it's for PowerEdge servers but they are pretty good with
support for anything Dell-branded under Linux that's vaguely server
related.

As for this list...

> 03:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS
> 2008 [Falcon] (rev 03)
>      Subsystem: Dell MegaRAID SAS 2008 [Falcon]
>      Kernel modules: megaraid_sas
> 
> So looks like Linux is recognising it.

Check what dmesg and lsscsi/lsblk say.  dmesg will usually provide you
with a list all the devices that the card claims to have connected and
is usually pretty informative for these types of cards.

One guess that could explain no devices showing up is that you're
missing a step in the card's BIOS - like assembling the drives into a
RAID array but not creating a volume on it, or something like that.

Could also be it's appearing as a nonstandard device, like /dev/blah0
instead of what you expect.  I've also found I needed more up-to-date
versions of megacli in the past to correctly detect certain cards as
the version in the distro I was using was many years out of date.  This
is especially the case if you're using a desktop focused distro with a
server/workstation focused part.

Also my 2c is that these devices work better in "dumb" or passthrough
mode, presenting the three disks to Linux as three disks and then using
Linux's software RAID to handle things.  In my experience it performs
better and allows quicker recovery if the RAID card dies because the
on-disk format is non-proprietary and works with any Linux distro.

Anyway, the Dell list is probably your best bet.

Cheers,
Adam.