Dell R620 with PERC s110 and LSI Centos 8 not discovering RAID drives

Question

I have acquired a Dell poweredge R620 that has a PERC S110. I am familiar with my Dell T420 that holds the PERC H710 (I beleive) and in bios F2 if you choose RAID mode you reboot and have access to ctrl+r that will boot you into PERC RAID. My T420 I do this and can configure RAID with SATA SSD by using interposers cause the perc is SAS

This R620 with S110 PERC, when I choose RAID mode in bios and reboot. I get the ctrl+r but when I boot into the RAID it does not discover any of my SSD drives at all. I can see them on post boot but not in the RAID. I have explored everything under the sun and I could not understand why it is not finding the drives.

However, someone helped me boot into LSI config ctrl+c that is a RAID and found those drives and I can configure them there after alot of huffing and puffing because there was a series of steps to take. I think this is a software RAID? I don't get it. The bios boot is solidflare I am unfamiliar with and the boot in bios is not set to RAID mode but AHCI mode.

Anyways I would like to know if this LSI config is software RAID. I'm used to booting to the PERC RAID and config from there and would like to know what is going on here. If anyone came across this kind of setup please shed some light on this.

many thanks.

I configured raid1 on it. Its working fine just want to know LSI from ctrl+c vs direct perc s110 from ctrl+r — gstlouis, Nov 23 '20 at 18:12
So you have two RAID cards in your server? That seems pretty straightforward. — Michael Hampton, Nov 23 '20 at 18:18
Really I would have two raid cards? I didnt think of it that way, two physical raid cards. How can Iknow this? I only see one card pci with two cables going to the backplane. Let me see if I can share a pic.. — gstlouis, Nov 23 '20 at 18:21
Anything PERC S* will not work with any operating system other than windows. Pull that card out and buy a H series PERC card. — Tom O'Connor, Dec 03 '20 at 01:19

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 23 '20 at 19:46

6

DELL S110 is nothing more than a fancy name for Intel software RAID (see the SATA controller specification). It depends on a device driver being present in Windows which effectively run the software RAID program.

Its only advantage over plain software RAID is that arrays are recognized (and bootable) by the BIOS. However, if using Linux I would absolutely prefer Linux MDRAID.

answered Nov 23 '20 at 19:46

shodanshok

47,711
7
111
180

1

So this is basically software RAID nonetheless right? Thanks for your comment. – gstlouis Dec 01 '20 at 21:00
1

@gstlouis yes, it basically is software RAID – shodanshok Dec 01 '20 at 23:03

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 02 '20 at 19:37

So after more searching I have enlightened myself more about the LSI RAID card.

In order to access this card I needed to config the bios to boot BIOS and not UEFI. With this enabled I was able to boot into with ctrl+c and configure my RAID 1. However, after reboot and booting with a flash centos8 it would not recognize the drives.

I later figured out this was because this LSI card isn't supported by centos8, it doesn't have the drivers at Kernel level. I had to get this into an iso, make a flash drive and then edit the init booting linux string with inst.dd.

This is a good video I have found. Lengthy, but if you speed it up he really goes through it all for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fOAuXiynYM

So when I though the LSI was the software RAID because in the bios I had set mode RAID I belive it was giving me the option to boot into this PERC S110 that seems to be a built in software RAID jsut for windows. When I opened the machine I saw the card was LSI so I configured this accordingly, with some fiddling in the bios of course. I don't believe my questions was properly asked, but at least maybe this answer can help someone with an old LSI card that wont work with centos 8

Dell R620 with PERC s110 and LSI Centos 8 not discovering RAID drives

2 Answers2