Recently, I decided to install Ubuntu on an old Compaq server I had. But I couldn’t get the installer to detect any of the 5 hard disks in the system. Admittedly this was a very old server. Compaq ceased to exist as a company over a decade ago and this server was released in around 1998.
Linux in general has a reputation for running on old hardware which nothing else supports so I was mystified why the installer couldn’t find any volumes.
After some research I discovered that the SCSI controller required a kernel module called ‘cpqarray’. But only after an extensive search did I discover why it wasn’t in the installers list of extra driver modules.
It was disabled in the Linux Kernel makefile in October 2013 and other than a few arch users no one really noticed. Presumably nobody complained enough to save it and so it was removed from the Kernel forever in March 2016.
This was quite a problem for me, because if I wanted to use the systems SCSI controller then I would have to use a 2013 kernel (and distro), which in 2018 is years old.
Unless… I got the code for the module, put it back into the kernel source, compiled it as a module, and run it in the installer. Then I would be able to format the drives and install Ubuntu. Easier said than done.
The rest of the page is a work in progress, I will complete it when I have time and when I have a put together a cpqarray module which works with DKMS so others can use it easily and so it doesn’t need to be built manually.
To get disk partitions to mount correctly: Edit /etc/fstab and get rid of the ‘UUID=’ replace it with ‘/dev/ida/xxxx’