Operton with Mylex DAC960 and grub

[Bruce]

I'm trying to install Gentoo on an opteron with a DAC960 Raid controller. The install goes fine until the boot loader installation.

Both lilo and grub are masked for the amd64. I emerged grub-static but it will not see the DAC960 controller.

[warren64]

This post sounds strangely familiar. When I attempted a Gentoo install on my opteron server with the Mylex contoller I met the same fate. I had hoped Gentoo's optimized kermel and install would better the Redhat I am very acquainted with. I won't be switching my systems from Redhat anytime soon!

[Bruce]

In the rare event anyone else has this problem. I managed to figure out a solution. I installed freedos on a floppy. On the floppy I also added loadlin.exe and bzImage. This allowed me to boot the new kernel and pass all the required kernel paramters.

Once I did this, grub behaved normally and I was able to install grub on the hard disk. I'm not sure why this worked but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the DAC960 is a module on the installation CD. The new kernal is monolithic with respect to the DAC960. As a consequence grub gets a different bios response between the kernel used to install gentoo and the final compiled kernel.

[warren64]

Thanks for the tip. Once I booted the floppy with freedos and loadlin and my bzImage from the kernel compile it worked!