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I am installing centos 7 on Proliant DL180g6, with the logical drive.

I have 3 disks, with one RAID 1 arrays. I see the logical drive on the controller but I can't see that on installation centos.

my controller is b110i. How can I solve this and properly use the RAID controller?

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    Did you install the proper drivers for RAID controller? Jun 23, 2019 at 12:16
  • thanks. but how to install the driver without an operating system? Jun 24, 2019 at 5:13

2 Answers 2

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To have the proper drivers loaded during installation process you can follow the procedure described on this HP support page:

Go to HP website.

Click here to access the HPE website .

Click Support & Drivers.

Click Drivers and Software.

Enter the controller model "B110i SATA RAID Controller" and click Search.

Select the Red Hat Operating System version in question (for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server (x86-64)).

Click Software - Driver Update.

Download the recommended Driver Diskette for HP Smart Array B110i SATA RAID Controller for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (AMD64/EM64T), the name of the file should be hpahcisr-xx.xx.xx.rhel5.x86_64.dd.gz .

Once the driver diskette file is downloaded using a Linux machine (Desktop, Laptop, Server) extract the file using the command gzip -d hpahcisr-xx.xx.xx.rhel5.x86_64.dd.gz or gunzip hpahcisr-xx.xx.xx.rhel5.x86_64.dd.gz.

Now proceed to create a USB Flash Driver to make it work as a diskette, running the following command dd if= hpahcisr-xx.xx.xx.rhel5.x86_64.dd of=/dev/device_name, see the following example:

In this case the USB Key was recognized with device name sdb; therefore, the complete command is:

# dd if= hpahcisr-xx.xx.xx.rhel5.x86_64.dd of=/dev/sdb

Now, proceed to boot the server to install with the Operating System in question. Below an example of the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server (x86-64).

This is the RHEL 5 Installer first screen:

Press F2-Options to check on which options are available. The installer will show the following options to choose in which user can find linux dd in order to load a driver disk, see the sample below:

Once in there, plug the USB Flash Driver in which the driver disk has been created so it can be recognized by the Installer. Then, as the options states type linux dd and hit the Enter key. User should be prompted with the following screen:

Hit Yes option and then continue with the next screen. In this one user will be prompted with the source of the driver disk. See below sample:

If users are prompted with two options sda should be the once since scd0 is for the optical drive. In order to confirm, open tty4 pressing both ctrl + alt keys at the same time plus F4 Key. See the sample below in which list USB SanDisk (USB in used for this tutorial) recognized as sda.

Once this has been checked, return to Graphic Mode pressing both ctrl + alt keys at the same time plus F1 Key in order to continue with the installation and press OK to proceed to use the USB driver disk. User should see the progress of loading the driver module hpahcisr. See sample below:

Once the driver module loading process finish user should be prompted for more driver disk to load. User must hit NO and continue with the installation, see sample below:

After this option is prompted user must continue with the normal installation. The process will finish loading all necessary files to continue. Once this is done on the Graphic Mode user will see that all our Hard Disk Drives or single Hard Driver is recognized as HP LOGICAL VOLUME and not separate Drives.

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  • May I have some comment about the reason of downvote? Jun 24, 2019 at 7:26
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    thanks a lot. I didn't downvote and I can't vote to this reply because I have less than 15 reputations. Jun 24, 2019 at 9:37
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The B110i really is a fake raid controller - it requires a binary, opaque driver to be loaded into the OS kernel.

It will not buy you basically anything over software RAID, with the significant downside of using a proprietary driver and metadata.

So, I strongly suggest you to set the disk controller in AHCI/IDE mode and use Linux MDRAID instead of the proprietary one.

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