I purchased an older Dell PowerEdge 2500 system off a friend a few days ago and decided to get Solaris going on it. Given the age of this system, I assumed there wouldn't be any issues with hardware support. Oops ;-)
After selecting CD/DVD as the installation media type, the following screen displayed an error saying "no disks found". After some googling, I concluded that this message indicates that Solaris could not recognize the RAID controller - a Dell PERC 3/Di (Adaptec based). I tried both Solaris 10u3 and Solaris Nevada b59 without success. I decided to install FreeBSD 6.2 and it recognized the controller just fine. So I compared FreeBSD's aac driver with OpenSolaris' and they both have the same vendor/device/subvendor/subdevice IDs for Dell PERC 3/Di controllers. I feel like I'm missing something that's very simple and straightforward. e.g. is the aac driver not included on the CD/DVD due to licensing issues? Is there a substantial difference between FreeBSD's and Solaris' aac driver that would explain why it only works on FreeBSD? Thank you for any help. This message posted from opensolaris.org
