Problems installing Solaris 10 on Dell PowerEdge 800

Question

Hi,
I am experiencing some trouble when I attempt to install Solaris 10 on a Dell PowerEdge 800. It is equipped with two RAID disks controlled by a Dell CERC SATA 1.5/6ch (according to the BIOS).
The installation program reports that it cannot write to the disk. This happens when it is about to start installing files. Tried setting it to a single volume and disable RAID. Same thing. Read another article saying something about disabling IDE, well it doesn't seem to help ...
Any hints?

Answer 1

I have the same problem on a dell 750 with the SERC controller. I can add some more information but if you get a solution I would appreciate the detail.
1) If I install Solaris via the SERC in RAID 1 mode then the alarm on the SERC goes off as soon as I start to write to the disk.
2) I bypassed the SERC and installed on a single disk straight off the motherboard. Time the install crashed at the same point but this time the error message told me that the first available cylinder was number 3! Ah
3) I reconnected the disk via the SERC, rebuilt the RAID array and made a mistake. I created a RAID 0 (striped) array and installed the software starting from cylinder 3. I got a complete solaris install that rebooted fine and is fully working.
BUT I NEED A MIRRORED SYSTEM SO
4) I rebuild the machine again this time RAID 1 and again the crash occured at exactly the same point i.e. as soo as I start to write to the disk.
Whether or not DELL / Adaptec support Solaris should not be an issue. This is a BIOS configurable RAID controller that can be fully serviced (e.g. disks replaced) from the BIOS. The system sees the array as a disk via the controller and indeed it is seeing it.
The SERCs own data configuration data should be on sectors which are not visible to solaris VIA the SERC so we shouldnt be able to damage them but I suspect that this may not be the case.
I suspect that the answer is in the partition layout and who or what creates them (I dont mean the Solaris slices but the FDISK partitions)
To make matters worse, since I need the machine working I went back to disks straight of the motherboard and configured again and used metadevices to set up a fully mirrored systemas I have done many times before on sparc (but never on Solaris x86)
This worked fine but I thought that I would test bootability in the event of disk failure. There isnt any!
if disk 1 fails then the motherboard wont accept disk 2 unless you swap the cables and move it do disk 1 and by then the boot sectors are wrong for the address of the device. I can probably solve this by building both disks in slot one but who wants a mirrored server that you have to open up and move a cable when the disk fails. I think I may have to ditch SATA and go back to SCSI !