Install failure on Supermicro X8 PC with Intel SAS/SATA controller

Hey all -
I’ve just come across this project, and I’ve got a spare 16x300GB SBOD
The FC HBA is detected fine, but I don’t want to use this for OS installation, as I’d like to split this into 2x 2TB arrays, and use one of my 300GB WDC SAS drives for the OS
Regardless of whether I configure the internal controller as IDE, IDE Enchanced, AHCI, or Intel raid, the drives are never detected.
What’s worse, if I configure the drives as a stock raid 1 hardware config, the installer blows up prior to language selection and I’m not even able to access the anaconda logs via tty2

Logs are here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7916275/rockstor/storage.log
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7916275/rockstor/program.log

It did successfully poll all 16 drives in the FC SBOD after pulling one of the WD drives - but at no point would it display anything other than the image below with both drives installed.

I’ve been using the shortened command, where we select troubleshooting, edit the command then remove everything after DHCP, as I only get a black screen with pointer if I leave the other commands in place.

@scottharman Hello and welcome to the Rockstor community. So first up I’m afraid I have little experience with multi path arrangements and it seems that is complicating things for our re-branded only upstream Anaconda installer, it’s also worth noting that as far as I’m aware Rockstor once installed isn’t going to work as expected with multi-path devices anyway, although there is work underway to hopefully make this an easier transition in the future. There are also plans to update our installer to a new upstream snapshot which may also help.

Given that, I would tend to try and simply your hw setup as much as possible for the install, which uses a much older kernel than the final installed system anyway. And all drive management, at least for the data drives, is handled via the final installed system and it’s WebUI, so the installer’s only job is to get the rockstor’s system disk setup.

So my advice initially would be to first try an install to a plain locally attached SATA and there should be no issue using AHCI (the preferred and modern default) setting so no need to play with that setting. There after, assuming things pan out in a less frustrating fashion to you experience so far and you get an installed Rockstor system; you could re-attach your FC HBA configured without multi-path and see how it shows up within the installed Rockstor system (or otherwise of course!).

Hope that helps at least for the time being and apologies if I have miss understood your trials so far.

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Thanks @phillxnet -
Understand and appreciate that… with the FC HBA booted but with no drives, I’m still not seeing anything sensible coming up - when two SAS (or SATA) drives attached, the installer just bombs completely and I’m unable to access the anaconda environment (as I get the error on a black GUI screen and can’t switch to tty2)
With only one SATA or SAS drive attached directly, it seems to be presented as read only according to the logs.
I’ll re-run that test with a fresh pair of eyes and ensure it’s repeatable and not just a spurious error.
I was just a bit surprised that all my multipath devices were detected and not a bog-standard SAS array :wink: