Chris Heiner wrote:
We are very familiar with Adaptec as their headquarters are here in California and we used them exclusively back in our Novell / NT / SCSI days. Showing my age. The Marvell Sata is actually an AIC 8130, I wasn't aware of it until I did a
Ah, now I know exactly what you have. First of all, you do not have RAID card. It's just fake-RAID thing in BIOS that makes you think you got a RAID card, but in reality it is just an ordinary plain SATA controller and the RAID stuff is done in software by device driver. Exactly the same as using plain SATA controller in Linux and configuring software RAID using md meta devices. I remember having one of those in some SuperMicro servers.
Currently there's no device driver for Marvell chipset in CentOS kernel. Apprently there is some support for those (sata_mv driver) in latest and greatest vanilla kernels (visit www.kernel.org). When it becomes stable, it'll probably be backported to RHEL4 and therefore CentOS.
You have several options until than. You could try compiling and using latest kernel from kernel.org. Or you could spend couple of dollars and buy some cheap (but supported) SATA controller (AIC 8130 is not an RAID controller at all, it's a fake, so you are not loosing anything by going that route, simply configure good old Linux software RAID if you need mirroring or something like that).
If you really want/need real hardware RAID thing, you'd need to buy 3ware or Adaptec (watch out, unlike 3ware, not all Adaptecs are real hardware stuff, some of them are fake-RAID). Trust me, that Windows thing you installed on the box is just running on top of software RAID. It's conveniently hidden from you by BIOS and by device driver, but that is what in reality it is.
You can also check if the motherboard has another SATA controller on it. For example, the SuperMicros that I had came with hard drive bays wired to 4-port Marvell controller (AIC-8130). However, there were also two additional ports on the motherboard controlled by Intel's SATA controller (integrated into chipset). Since I had only two drives anyhow, I just moved the cables to the Intel's ports. Since most chipsets nowdays have integrated SATA contoller, there's good chance you already have SATA controller supported by CentOS kernel in the box. It's only the question if HP bothered to solder the connectors for that controller onto motherboard (SuperMicro did). If there are connectors for the integrated SATA controller, simply move the cables to them.
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