Installing Centos on HP Proliant DL360e Gen8 with B120i controller

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Installing centos 5.7 on HP Proliant DL360e Gen8 was a headache. First of all it comes with HP B120i Dynamice smart array controller which centos or redhat doesnt detect by default. We have to install a source driver from HP separately to detect this controller.

At first I created the RAID 1 logical array using the acu(array configuration utility) oh HP server. And started installing Centos. Installation proceeded but at the time of drive select it showed the two 500GB hard disks instead of one single raid 1 device. That means os couldn't detect the storage controller.

After a lot of googling and HP customer support I found the steps to do it.
HP B120i driver is supported from Redhat/Centos 5u7 onwards.

You can download the driver for Redhat/Centos driver from here
hpvsa-1.2.6-11.rhel5u7.x86_64.dd.gz

Creating the usbkey:

Form a Linux System:
Download the driver file
unzip it using the following command
#gunzip hpvsa-1.2.6-11.rhel5u7.x86_64.dd.gz
you will get hpvsa-1.2.6-11.rhel5u7.x86_64.dd

Now burn the file on usb drive
suppose usb drive is detected as /dev/sdc (check, be carefull)

Run the following command
#dd if=hpvsa-1.2.6-11.rhel5u7.x86_64.dd of=/dev/sdc

Now
Boot the HP proliant DL360e Gen8 Server with usb plugged in and Centos/Redhat 5u7 DVD inserted.

on the first boot screen, :

Type the following command and hit enter.
boot: linux dd blacklist=ahci

Then you will be be prompted with the following screen:

Hit Yes option and then continue with the next screen. In this one user will be prompted with the source of the driver disk. See below sample:

User should see the progress of loading the driver module hpahcisr . See sample below:

Once the driver module loading process finish user should be prompted for more driver disk to load. User must hit NO and continue with the installation, see sample below:

After this option is prompted user must continue with the normal installation. The process will finish loading all necessary files to continue. Once this is done on the Graphic Mode user will see that all our Hard Disk Drives or single Hard Driver is recognized as HP LOGICAL VOLUME and not separate Drives. Is that is the situation then the driver has not been loaded properly. See the sample below:

You are done. Let the installation finish.