Intel® Server Board S1200V3RPM sata drives

tonyolm · February 14, 2024, 10:00pm

Server is older but works fine.

Intel® Server Board S1200V3RPM sata drives
2 Samsung 850 pro SSDs and 2 seagate 1 TB mechanical drives

I wanted to play around with almalinux…

Windows 10/11 sees the drives just fine.

When installed from a ISO of Almalinux minimal install it doesn’t see the drives.

I set the sata controller as compatibility, enhanced, ACHI and raid mode. While in raid mode created volumes with the drives in both intel esrt2 (LSI*) mode and Intel RSTe mode.

I assumed the install would see basic sata drives.

Am I missing something so basic I’m not seeing it? I have had no issue with redhat and centos over the years…

Tony

jlehtone · February 15, 2024, 8:36am

Likely explanation is that drivers (kernel module) for the SATA controller are not included. Red Hat does not support every device out there; they do tend to drop support for older devices in each major version. There is however ELRepo that builds some of those “missing” kernel modules for EL.

Can you run lspci -nn on the system? That will tell device ID.

For example:

$ lspci -nn | grep SATA
00:17.0 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SATA AHCI Controller [8086:a352] (rev 10)

reveals that device ID of Cannon Lake SATA Controller is 8086:a352

LinuxGuy1997 · February 15, 2024, 2:21pm

This is the issue right here – the proprietary “RAID mode” of most consumer motherboards only works with Windows, and rarely has linux drivers available.

(side note: Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST) is a Windows-only RAID implementation; even though Intel submitted the necessary source to the kernel developers years ago, they refused to include it for a number of reasons, including power management and performance issues.)

You will need to change the SATA controller mode to non-RAID–that’s usually either AHCI or compatibility, or something along those lines–at which point the drives will be viewable/usable with linux.

Note, however, that making this change after having installed Windows usually requires reloading it again, so first back up any needed data etc. !

jlehtone · February 15, 2024, 3:05pm

Oh my, how did I skip that? Yes, that can be it.

I have one machine with Intel “6th gen” CPU and AlmaLinux 8.
It has NVMe SSD that Alma sees fine.
It has pair of HDD, on RST RAID-1. That array Alma sees fine too.
Then I did add SATA SSD. Alma does not see that at all (while Windows does).
Yes, if I do switch the SATA controller from RAID mode to AHCI mode, then SSD shows up.

We have thus three suspects (so far):

No driver for controller
There is driver, but installer does not detect/assemble arrays
There is driver, but RAID mode masks non-arrays

LinuxGuy1997 · February 15, 2024, 3:18pm

I stand corrected – never saw anything updated about the kernel developers merging in any of the Intel RST stuff! Thanks, will have to look into that more…

tonyolm · February 15, 2024, 6:38pm

#lspci -nn

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3 Processor DRAM Controller [8086:0c08] (rev 06)

00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x16 Controller [8086:0c01] (rev 06)

00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI [8086:8c31] (rev 05)

00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #2 [8086:8c2d] (rev 05)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #1 [8086:8c10] (rev d5)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #2 [8086:8c12] (rev d5)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #3 [8086:8c14] (rev d5)

00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #1 [8086:8c26] (rev 05)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation C226 Series Chipset Family Server Advanced SKU LPC Controller [8086:8c56] (rev 05)

00:1f.2 RAID bus controller [0104]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family SATA Controller 1 [RAID mode] [8086:8c06] (rev 05) <-------------------------------------------

00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:8c22] (rev 05)

00:1f.6 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation 8 Series Chipset Family Thermal Management Controller [8086:8c24] (rev 05)

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. MGA G200e [Pilot] ServerEngines (SEP1) [102b:0522] (rev 05)

03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Network Connection [8086:1533] (rev 03)

04:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Network Connection [8086:1533] (rev 03)

Same command with controller set to achi. Just wanted to see what showed up.

[liveuser@localhost ~]$ lspci -nn