will FC2 help me bypass install failure?
Hi. I would like to install FC2 on my new machine.
I recently put it together out of a 13 GB IDE
drive and an ECS Athlon MB from Fry's. I needed to
install RedHat 7.3, and it was quite difficult.
The installation itself went OK, but the machine
would not boot from either a floppy or from the
IDE hard drive. It would boot in rescue mode
with the CDROM, but even chroot'ing, this was not a
practical workable solution. So, I searched
google with regard to the ECS motherboard, and
found a lot of posts detailing similar issues.
Although the information from the posts was sort
of fragmented and contradictory, it indicated that
nobody tried using a bootable SCSI drive. I had a
2 GB surplus drive and an Adaptec 2940UW card
sitting around. Obviously, without these items
sitting around, it would be foolish to purchase
these items, since the card costs more than a new
motherboard. The motherboard had been sitting
around too long for Fry's to accept a return, and
the support at ECS Elitegroup stalled and put me
on e-mail tech support hold to resolve the issue.
This method worked a little bit. The SCSI disk
was too small for a full install, and even with
the install that I wanted (kernel source, etc.),
it placed drivers in /usr. This was devastating
to me, since I could not try the remount trick.
So, I went with a minimal install, intending to
upgrade later. The install went well, and the
machine would boot off the SCSI. Also, I could
see the IDE drive partitions (once the system had
booted). This setup would not have worked for a
practical system, since I needed dual boot
capability for a killer app that only ran under
7.3, and a more modern distro, such as FC2.
It was not possible to place a monolithic root
partition on the SCSI drive, since it is too
small. It is even too small for the full
(required) RedHat 7.3 install. To expand the
size, I got the wild idea to reformat one of the
partitions on the large IDE drive, and cp -r the
contents of /usr (the largest directory) to the
IDE partition. Then, I would place an entry in
the /etc/fstab with the /dev/hda1 partition as
/usr, and mount it with a line in
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit near the mount -f / line.
Of course, there would be a brutal moment after
doing an rm -rf /usr/* , but after rebooting and
remounting, everything should be OK.
It was not OK. Once /usr/* was removed, the OS
started behaving unpredictably. The GUI went
down, and I was left with a text screen. Then,
the reboot hung, and I had to hit the power
switch. Fortunately, this ATX power supply has a
hard power switch (the soft switch becomes
inoperative). After the restart, there were a
huge number of error messages, and the OS
started a text login session. With the init
respawning something dependent on /usr, the
screen flashed intermittently, so it was hard to
edit and enter commands. But, finally, I realized
that the mount commands in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
were red herrings. I could just kick the ass of
the idiot who put in these misleading lines. The
message "Mounting local filesystems" that appears
during boot gives the real location for putting
the mount /usr command. After doing this and
rebooting, the machine came up fine and was
usable, if a little weakly enabled from the
minimal install.
So, things are at the state of one monolithic
/ partition on the SCSI drive which is mostly
empty, due to the transfer of /usr. Then, there
are plenty of empty partitions and space on the
IDE drive. The reason that I could not do this
tricky install from entirely within Anaconda is
that only the SCSI driver appeared while
installing, even though the IDE drive was at all
times accessible. I could just kick the ass of
the idiot who put in this limitation.
In order to install FC2, this partition will have
to be resized (defragged and compacted) so that
it takes up less space. Then, a new, smaller
root partition must be installed, on the SCSI,
not the IDE, lest it not be bootable. The /usr,
or even better, everything but the /boot should
go to the IDE drive. Either an inability to
see the IDE drive, or a refusal to install on
more than one disk at a time would blow me out of
the water. Also, any flakyness or hiccups of
parted (which FC2 is supposed to employ during
installation) would likewise make the install
difficult. I checked the FC2 FAQ's and docs,
but did not see anything relating to this matter.
Does anyone have any experience/insight regarding
these issues?
Thanks,
Lin
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