FC3T3 grub hangs on brand new DELL 8300, fix with some BIOS settings

Anne & Lynn Wheeler lynn at garlic.com
Sun May 2 04:03:30 UTC 2004


grub hangs on brand new DELL 8300, BIOS A05, two 250gbyte SATA drives,
SATA raid controller, 4gbyte memory. SATA bios raid configuration not
changed/touched. 

install from FC3T3 CDROM works w/o problem .. to simplify things 
all defaults used ... with all old partitions deleted.

tested with and w/o BIOS limiting memory to 256mbytes.

grub 0.94 diskette boots (built from a FC3T3 system on a dell 410)

root tab sees fd0 & hd0

root (hd0, sees part0, type ext2f2/0x83     aka /boot
              & part1, type unknown/0x82    aka swap

this is /dev/sda, first sata drive
default config puts "/" on /dev/sdb, 2nd sata drive


cdrom linux rescue boots and is able to mount /boot & / and can
access/change files


direct boot from harddisk, results in display "GRUB" and then nothing,
power cycle is required.


with grub diskette and setting root to hd0,0

then any attempt to read file hangs grub solid requiring power cycle.

fstest doesn't turn up anything
ioprobe results in reboot
find a file in (hd0,0) i.e. /boot, hangs and requires power cycle
boot vmlinuz file in (hd0,0) hangs and requires power cycle
slashimage (hd0,0) file hangs and requires power cycle

find a file that doesn't exists, comes back with file not found


if SATA RAID array definitions are deleted, then no drives can be 
found by anybody.


so you won't believe the solution. it would appear that FC2T3
ignores the SATA RAID definitions and directly accesses the physical
devices (i.e. /dev/sda & /dev/sdb)  ... while GRUB with HD0 .... 
(may?) goes thru the SATA RAID controller definition. The master 
boot record are enuf the same ... so that booting GRUB from the
harddisk gets it to the point where it says GRUB.


It appears that the work around is to try and make the SATA RAID
definitions match the FC2T3 direct access to the device. In the SATA
RAID BIOS setup, define two separate STRIPE arrays, each with one
physical disk drive.

(re-)install from cdrom, then things boot fine.






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