Installed on SATA, SW RAID, LVM, but won't boot
Frank
FIR at Frank.net
Sat Dec 11 23:54:14 UTC 2004
After trying everything I could think of the get my Adaptec 2410SA
controllers to work with FC3, (like they used to!) I gave up and tried
another approach. Both motherboards described below have four SATA
ports on the board. I pulled the adaptec cards out, enabled the SATA
controllers (but not the BIOS RAID mode) on the boards, and plugged in
the drives. I don't expect Linux SW raid to give me the same striping
performance that the 2410SA w/RAID 10 would, but at this poiunt I jsut
want SOMETHING to work.
In both cases, all four drives were recognized. I created a mirrored
boot, and LVM partition on the first two drives, as well as a
non-mirrored SWAP partition on each. The third and fourth drives went
to a single LVM partition.
In the LVM I created a fair sized / filesystem and a couple other larger
ones. The installation proceeded smoothly on both systems
But neither one will boot. I can see everything if I boot of the
install DVD, but if I try to boot from the hard drive I get a blank
screen with a flashing cursor, and that's all.
I've been working pretty much continuously on this for a day and a half
now with no joy. I had some time this weekend to get these systems
configured (a rare luxury) and so far I can't even get the initial
installation done.
Can anyone help?
Frank.
Frank wrote:
> One month prior to FC3 being released I installed FC2 on a system with
> an Adaptec 2410SA Serial ATA RAID controller and a four drive array.
> As I recall, it installed easily without a driver disk. When FC3 came
> out I did a fresh install on the same system, and it installed easily
> and ran well.
>
> Last week I bought another system with the same controller, but with a
> different motherboard. I needed to move the working array to the new
> system, where the boot would begin and then crash with a message about
> sleeping in the wrong context or something like that. I decided to
> install cleanly.
>
> To make a long story short I now have two systems, one with an Asus
> K8N-E and one with an Asus A8V motherboard, both with freshly
> initialized 4 drive arrays, and I can't install AMD64 FC3 to either
> one of them. In each case the install proceeds to the partitioning
> stage. It appears that the moment FC3 attempts to partition the array
> the controller card's alarm sounds and FC3 reports that it could not
> read the disk. On reboot, both controllers report the array status as
> being optimal., and all format/initialize/array creation operations
> have gone just fine.
>
> I have tried using the adaptec CD to make a driver disk. Fedora is
> not a lsited option - I tried ES3 and the resulting disk was not
> accepted by FC3 (no driver found). I looked at choosing simply
> "Redhat" but then AMD64 was not an option.
>
> One of these systems is exactly the same as what worked well over the
> last couple months on FC2 and FC3, except that it now has larger
> drives in it. The motherboard in the other one (The A8V) seems to be
> a popular choice for Linux. I don't see any messages suggesting that
> FC3 has a problem with either motherboard.
>
> So why does FC3 suddenly seem to be incompatible with the Adaptec
> 2410SA controllers that worked in the past for me and seem to be
> working for other people as well?
>
> I'm out of things to try at this point. The shiny new computers that
> I was so looking forward to (finally replacing Windows with Linux on
> my home network) are very expensive paperweights until I solve this.
> Any help will be gratefully received.
>
> (I haven't played with any boot options. I don't know what the
> options are or when to use them)
>
> Frank.
>
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