SCO

Hi all

Can anybody offer any help with installing Openserver 6 on a Supermicro server?
I am familiar with installing OS5, but this is my first time with v6.
The PC is fitted with Supermicro X8DTL-I Dual Xeon motherboard and 2 Xeon E5620 processors, and 16Gb Ram, LSI MegaRaid SAS8708 8 port RAID controller, & 7 SAS disks.

Unfortuantely there are no IDE controllers onboard, so the CDROM drive is SATA, but configured in the Bios to be ''IDE''. It seems the SCO doesn't like this device.

The system boots off the SCO CD ok to start with, but when I try to load additional HBA drivers either off the SCO Media, or from a CD made from the LSI installation CD containing drivers for the RAID card, the install just says ' Processing drivers...' and hangs. There is no activity on the CD drive from this point on, and I am forced to reboot.

(Also, the machine does not have a floppy drive).

Has anyone any ideas why the machine is hanging?
I have tried reducing RAM to 4Gb, reducing number of active Cores in CPUs to 1 each, turning off all performance related parameters in the BIOS but to no avail.

I attached a USB CD drive, with similar results - the only difference was I got a Timeout message whilst trying to load HBA drivers rather than a Hang, so I am guessing the issue relates to the CD drive.

I noticed a Driver supplement patch 7.1.4d on SCO site which relates to SATA CDROM's not emulating IDE properly, but I cannot get this patch on either which I've been trying to do through the 'Add additional HBA drivers' section early in the install. Again the CD drive just hangs... Catch 22!

Any advice anyone?

Don't suppose you have a PATA expansion card hanging around?

Your system sounds like the Intel system that I just built. There are two problems, the first is that there is more than 4gb of memory, so there is a problem with the USB. This causes the USB cd-rom not to work after the kernel is loaded off the install disk.
Installing OSS714 solves the problem.
The other problem that I had was trying to use the onboard SATA as a simple IDE Master.
See the thread about installing 6.0.0 on an Intel rack system from about a month ago.

Many thanks for your reply jgt.
I've already tried removing ram to leave 4Gb but this hasn't helped.
I have made some more discoveries though : the system does not have a floppy drive fitted, so I was trying to load the LSI RAID driver from a CD I burnt and it was at this point that the system became unresponsive. Do you have to have a floppy to install OS6?

I've since fitted a USB floppy drive (with only 4Gb RAM fitted) with a view to loading the driver from a floppy. With this approach I get a message saying Error when mounting HBA media.
If I then press ALT SysRq + h, to show the console log it shows following message :-

ERROR#1 status=OK .556-usbd0 001D0 <Drv16> followed by
WARNING: FDC unexpected state

I presume from this that the floppy drive controller is not being recognised properly by Unix.
It seems that without working floppy there is no way to load either the LSI RAID driver or the OSS714 patch.
Does anyone know if the install can be made to use a USB stick instead of a floppy to load these drivers on?

Any further advice welcome as am stuck right now! Thanks in advance,

Andy

Andy,
OSS714 is installed after the installation is complete, and after maintenance pack 4 (MP4) is installed.
I used the MP4 drivers cd that you can download from The SCO Group, Inc. | Support | Update | Download | Release for the initial install, using the same LSI driver.
Does your machine have a PS2 keyboard and mouse?
Can you reduce the memory to less than 4gb? The problem that OSS714 addresses may affect machines with more than 3.999gb of memory.
Jack

Hi Jack

Thanks very much for your advice.

I can download MP4 no problem, but how do you use it DURING the install to load the HBA drivers for LSI?
When prompted whether to load additional HBA drivers, the install seems ONLY to look for a floppy drive for them, it doesnt read the CD.

Could you advise procedure for use in Install?
The ReadMe gives instructions only for use on already installed system.

Thank you
Andy

There are two different cd's. The MP4 cd and the MP4 driver cd.
Use the MP4 driver cd when asked for "any additional drivers" at the beginning of the install.
If you prefer (or need to) you can copy the driver from the cd to a diskette.