Highly Reliable Systems endeavors to support as many systems as possible within our resources. NOVELL is a well known platform among the computing server crowd. Presently, because of licensing, providing drivers for NOVELL is difficult. At this time, the only information we have regarding using Novell with High-Rely products is as follows:

  1. Novell may work with Silicon Image controllers on a limited basis without any additional drivers or installations. However, it probably won’t support multiple drives on one eSATA channel (port multiplier technology) which High-Rely devices make heavy use of. Several newer High-Rely products do not require this feature to operate such as the Tandem DXR (in safe mode) and FirstRAID G2 (in safe mode) and thus may operate fine.
  2. We have achieved full functionality with High-Rely eSATA products using the PCI-E 1225SA controller from Adaptec. Presently we do not sell this controller but it is readily available from many suppliers who resell Adaptec. In accomplishing compatibility, the following steps had to be taken:
    1. The BIOS on the Adaptec card had to be updated to the very latest from the Adaptec website.
      1. In order to update the BIOS you must have a DOS bootable system. We used FreeDOS with a USB stick to boot from. In order to do this the FreeDOS OS had to be downloaded.
      2. Then, the HP Utility USB Disk Storage tool was downloaded to format the USB stick to be bootable. When the utility requested boot directory, the path to the ODIN directory from the FreeDOS boot CD was supplied. This produced a DOS bootable USB stick. Then, the Adaptec BIOS and update utility were copied onto the stick as well. The stick was booted and the BIOS was updated.
    2. The driver file from the Adaptec website, adp3132-sles10sp1-b12083 (adp3132.sles10sp1.i586.rpm), was also placed on the USB stick. The Novell LINUX system (NOVELL Enterpise Server 10, SP1) was booted and the .RPM file was unfolded (file roller) onto a directory /usr/adaptec/adp3132. As root, rights were changed (chmod 777 install.sh), then install.h was executed. The system was rebooted and saw high-products successfully after the install. lsmod should have the “adp3132” listed under scsi modules. The test system was on a Gigabyte GA-G33M motherboard with an intel core 2 processor and 1GB of RAM.

 

NOVELL is based on SUSE LINUX which is supposedly supported directly by Silicon Image, but we were unsuccessful at making it so.