success with embedded AIC7880 on HP NetRAID?

[tom minchin]

Hi,
        I attempted to install an HP NetRAID machine today with Linux
(it was a spec unseen "here's the box, tell us when you're done" type of
thing). It had one of those Mylex i960 RAID cards - which I took out since
the drivers aren't even standard kernel yet - which had 3 9G SCA drives.
According to the bootup screen, it has onboard AIC7880. I attempted to
hook up the SCAs to that. I appeared to be successful in that I could
detect the drives ok.
        The RH5.1 bootdisk found the 7880 ok, and the 3 drives. I was
able to partion up the disks, even format with bad block checking the
swap partitions. However, when I tried to lay down the ext2 filesystem
onto the disks the controller would timeout and reset - causing the
mke2fs to hang (essentially aborting the install). I was able to have
a little more success with the updated boot.img but even then the best
I got was two partitions in before the controller gave up.
        Anyone else had success with these HP machines? I notice that
they've fiddled with the 7880 BIOS a bit, as there's no 'auto termination'
off/on feature (or is that normal for the 7880? I'm used to the 2940). Is
it termination perhaps? (the disks happily formatted and wrote when it
was installed with NT - I tried this just to see). 

tom at interact.net.au

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