To enable block devices on the HP/Compaq Smart Array controller, (built into motherboards on some HP Proliant DL380 servers), the driver must be loaded dynamically after boot.

I had an external DLT tape drive attached to this server and had to add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local in RHEL3 before the tape driver was recognized:

for x in /proc/driver/cciss/cciss[0-9]*
do
    echo "engage scsi" > $x
done

 

According to HP/Compaq documentation, the cciss driver is known to work with these cards:

• SA 5300
• SA 5i
• SA 532
• SA 5312

See the kernel source documentation for the csiss driver for more details.