This is pretty technical, so must of you will want to leave the room.
Today I spent most of my day trying to figure out why I couldn’t install Trixbox 2.4.2 (CentOS 5) on the new Intel S5000VSA motherboard I purchased for a client.
Everything will install as normal, but then when it tries to boot you get a blank screen. No GRUB, no nothing. So I tried to install the RAID drivers from my portable usb hard drive. Well, guess what…..it installed Trixbox onto my USB drive since the drivers didn’t take. So now I have a blank drive that used to have all my music, movies and backup files. SWEET!!!!!! So I started using my google-fu on EFI, RAID, everything. The MB is pretty new so not much was out there on it. I finally found what causes it.
It turns out that when you follow Intel’s instructions to configure the raid out of the box it really messes up Linux. The raid provided on the MB is software raid and linux doesn’t pick it up correctly. So most people would then turn off the MB raid and reinstall. Well, no go there either since the virtual volume is still there as far as Linux is concerned. So you have to go back, enable the raid, reboot, remove the virtual volume, reboot, disable raid, reboot and then finally reinstall with the Linux software raid.
All of this isn’t too easy to find unless you know that people refer to this MB raid as “fake raid” or software raid. Once you hit on that, it starts falling into place