SLES12 HP DL380 Gen9 P440ar controller and SAS Expander Car

Hi everybody,
I’ve tried to install SLES12 via Autoyast on a HP DL380 Gen9. Bios is set to legacy mode, hardware is a P440ar controller with SAS Expander Card. During loading the kernel it stop at 64% and after a while the system crash with a trace that says that there is no diskspace. So far, so bad… If I remove the Expander card system is installable. I’ve then installed the newest kernel 3.12.39-47-default and re-connect the Expander card. System boots up. I don’t know if the system is able to recognize the last 4 HDDs because there are only 6 in the machine. I guess I have to build a second logical volume with them.
Now my question: Is there a way to get the installer to use the newer kernel while first loading it? Or must I rebuild the installer-DVD incl. the initrd on it with the new kernel? Are there things to pay attention on it? Can I use the initrd of the upgraded system for the installer?

I have asked this question wrong in the SLED-Forum, so this is a crosspost https://forums.suse.com/showthread.php?6467-SLES12-HP-DL380-Gen9-P440ar-controller-and-SAS-Expander-Car

On Thu, 04 Jun 2015 10:24:01 GMT, tgajewski
tgajewski@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com wrote:
[color=blue]

Hi everybody,
I’ve tried to install SLES12 via Autoyast on a HP DL380 Gen9. Bios is
set to legacy mode, hardware is a P440ar controller with SAS Expander
Card. During loading the kernel it stop at 64% and after a while the
system crash with a trace that says that there is no diskspace. So far,
so bad… If I remove the Expander card system is installable. I’ve then
installed the newest kernel 3.12.39-47-default and re-connect the
Expander card. System boots up. I don’t know if the system is able to
recognize the last 4 HDDs because there are only 6 in the machine. I
guess I have to build a second logical volume with them.
Now my question: Is there a way to get the installer to use the newer
kernel while first loading it? Or must I rebuild the installer-DVD incl.
the initrd on it with the new kernel? Are there things to pay attention
on it? Can I use the initrd of the upgraded system for the installer?

I have asked this question wrong in the SLED-Forum, so this is a
crosspost
https://forums.suse.com/showthread.php?6467-SLES12-HP-DL380-Gen9-P440ar-controller-and-SAS-Expander-Car[/color]

Not sure if this applies to SLES 12 or not, but I had to download a
driver/boot disk from HP in order to get SLES 11 to install on a DL380
Gen9. I booted off that disk and after it took care of drivers, it
prompted me to insert my SLES disk and everything worked fine then.
Might be worth checking into.

KeN

Hi ketter,

this DVD only exists for SLES11.3 not for SLES12. In former times I had to go this way with SLES11.1 for the Gen8 machines. But there is an ugly trick to know: This won’t work with self-made autoyast-DVDs out of the box, you have to put the HP-repo and some other things to the normal SLES-DVD and manipulate a script inside the initrd. But that’s not the point. I need to know if I could use the “normal” initrd from a installed system for the autoyast-DVD, but it seems that I have to try it out.

Ok, now I know that it doesn’t work to only copy kernel and initrd to the autoyast. The system boots to the installed system… Just unpacking the newer one and copy the modules to the initrd of the autoyast will not work because the newer initrd is build by dracut, don’t know how to unpack it. The only way seems to be checking which modules are in the initrd of the autoyast and copy them in the newer version from the installed system. Then build the initrd new by using cpio and xz. Thats to much hassle for me.