Description of Problem:

I just was forced to play with a machine hosting 500 GB disk array
using 3ware escalade driver.  The device itself is identified by
'lspci' and 'lspci -n' as:

00:10.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc: Unknown device 1001 (rev 01)
00:10.0 Class 0104: 13c1:1001 (rev 01)

First the good news.  Currently this machine is running RH 7.1 distro
with updates and 2.4.9-12 kernel booted it "right of the box" without
any special hackery.  The biggest, "main storage", partition
I converted manually to ext3 (but left smaller "system" stuff alone)
and everything is running just fine.

Bad news and the gist of this report - attempts to install RH 7.2
on the same hardware dismally fail.

The following is not really in a chronological order in an attempt
to maintain clarity. :-)

RH 7.1 was installed using a "standard" installation CD and a driver
disk supplied by 3ware.  Nothing out of ordinary in the process
(with this exceptions that making a file system on 460 GB partition
takes a while and configuring X in anaconda fails although there
are no problems afterwards).

An attempt to use RH 7.2 distribution CD and its drivers floppy fails
to recognize the controller and its driver.  A peek into a table of
PCI ids on this floppy quickly reveals that 13c1:1000, and an
associated 3w-xxxx driver entry, are there but 13c1:1001 is missing.
Quick addition with an editor and this time on screen flashes
few times "Loading 3w-xxxx driver".  The problem is that the moment
it comes to partitioning screen "there is no such device" shows up.
'lsmod' on a console and 3w-xxxx is not a list.

After 'insmod 3w-xxxx' a device shows up and even 'fdisk -l sda' shows
an old partition table.  But attempts to rebuild a partition table, or
even get the disk into a "partition editor" end up with
"get_last_sector ioctl: bread returned NULL" errors.  What is more
even without writing anything to a disk somehow a raid array gets
corrupted and after reconstructing it, on a BIOS level, a partition
table is gone (although Linux still tries to boot, via lilo, goes
pretty far and panics with no init in sight).

Next try - RH 7.2 CD and a drivers disk from 3ware.  This, a bit
surprisingly, appears to work.  A driver loads and seems to recognize
a disk but attempts to partition the disk end up as before.

A syslog for both cases looks remarkably similar and a sample
is attached as 'syslog.install'.

Another approach - I install RH 7.1 and I try to upgrade to 7.2 a
working installation.  Regardless if I attempt to use a doctored, to
recognize the required PCI id, drivers disk from a new distribution or
that one supplied by 3ware, and does not matter what I am doing or not
on a command line of a console, I end up informed that "An upgrade is
impossible because there are no Linux partitions present" (or words to
that effect).  This after seeing on a screen lines:

<4>SCSI device sda: 976847361 512-byte hdwr sectors (500146 MB)
<6>Partition check:
<6> sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 < sda5 sda6 sda7 >

which is absolutely correct.  After that line I did not ever got
anything else shown or logged.

I attach a sample of a syslog from such attempts as 'syslog.update'.

From the above it looks like that I could likely hack my custom
boot floppies and get RH 7.2 installed but I was not that desperate
and had no that much time.

I am afraid that the hardware is not mine and it should be already
shipped (maybe it will be still around Friday morning) so I will
be not able to do much more testing with it.  As noted in the
opening Linux runs on it, and seems to be quite happy, even if this
is not 7.2 distribution.

  Michal
  michal@harddata.com