Easier way to install on 3ware 9550 card?

[Peter Giessel]

On Wednesday, January 10, 2007, at 01:22AM, "Dan Mahoney, System Admin" <danm at prime.gushi.org> wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Jan 2007, John Nielsen wrote:
>
>Apologies for top-posting.
>
>I've made some progress with this, but as I suspected, I'm screwed on 
>"namespace collision".  I.e. I am unable to load a version of twa.ko that 
>supports my 3ware card because a previous version of twa.ko that does not 
>support it is already in the generic kernel.  Changing the name of the 
>loadable doesn't help, either.
>
>It looks like I might have to make my own release, and my own ISO, using 
>the driver source from the 3ware site.
>
>Does anyone have an easier way of doing this?
>
>I've already emailed Scott Long asking about the possibility of the 
>inclusion of the new twa driver in the next FreeBSD, but I fear we're too 
>far down the release process, so it could be a YEAR before there's a 
>RELEASE that supports it.

When I was dealing with this issue on my own server, the solution I used
(which may or may not work for you) is that I took a cheep old IDE drive
and plugged it into the built in IDE controller on my motherboard.

I installed to and booted off this drive, installed the updated .ko to the
IDE drive's installation.  Now the 9550's arrays showed up, so I used
dump/restore to move the working installation onto the 9550's
partitions, shutdown, pulled the IDE drive out, and booted off the
9550's partitions and all was well.

Like I say, it may or may not work for you depending on if you have
an IDE controller someplace or an empty PCI slot that you could
use to set things up with.

hth.