[CentOS] Installation troubles

mark pryor
Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:32:55 -0000

Chuck Campbell <campbell at accelinc.com> wrote: I have a new machine
I'm trying to install Centos 5.0 on and I'm not getting
very far.

The system is 2 dual core xeons (5160, 3.0 GHZ) w/ 8GB ram.  It has two
320 GB disks on the motherboard controller (Supermicro X7DAE+), and 8 750
GB disks on a 3ware 9650SE-8ml, pcie (x4) controller card.  The 8 disks are
set up as two raid 5 volumes (4 disks each).

There is a scsi card in the machine w/ nothing attached to it.

The graphics card is na NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 (pci express x16).

The intent is to install the OS onto the 2-320GB drives on the motherboard
controller (preferrably in a raid 1 configuration).  The other disks are for
our data requirements.


1)I used bit torrent (azureus on windows) to download the dvd iso for Centos
  5.0, and it completed without any errors.  I believe it does the checksumming
  verification automatically.  I also ran sha1sum against the image, and it
  came out fine.

2)I burned the image to a dvd using roxio.  No errors.  When I couldn't get
  down the road, I burned another copy with no errors.

3)During the install, I verified the media with no errors for both of the
  disks.

4)I downloaded the driver for this OS and raid card from AMCC-3ware site and
  made a driver floppy.

5)I booted the dvd and ran "linux dd" to do the install.

      Should the graphical installer work on an nvidia quadro fx1500 graphics
      card?  At the present it doesn't appear to work for me, I get hash all
      over the screen, once X starts.

6)I booted the dvd again and ran "linux text dd".  I verified my dvd
media
  without problems, and it reads the driver floppy and loads the 3w-9xxx
  driver.  It asks questions about lang, kbd and timezone.

7)For partitions, I selected custom, created a /boot, /, swap and /home on
  the first 320 GB disk (it turns out to be sdc, with sda and sdb being the
  big raid volumes).  After the grub section (I told it to put grub on
  the /boot partition) the screen is blue, and it just sis without any further
  response (I left it over night, so it should have finished).

8)If I press alt-f3, the last thing I see is:
    13:18:16  INFO     :  Moving (1) to step reposetup

9)If I press alt-f4, the last thing I see is:
    <5>SQUASHFS error : sb_bread failed reading block 0x6acc
    <5>SQUASHFS error : unable to read page, block 1aaa0d9, size 9154

8)I'm at a loss as to what to try next, or how to find out what is wrong.


Chuck,

I'm suprised that the raid array wasn't named as
/dev/mapper/isw_xxxyyyxxx

to be named as /dev/sdc suggests that anaconda didn't use dmraid.
To be sure that the installer missed using dmraid, you could do a quick knoppix
(4.0+) live session and try to mount and read the fakeraid array named above.

If you don't find the isw_ device, then you will have to redo the install,
adding the dmraid kernel parameter along with "dd text dmraid".

As far as the blank screen, while in the knoppix session try to see if your
xorg.conf is missing a modeline. If missing, add a modeline suitable for your
monitor.

Section Screen
    ...
    Modes "1280x1024"
EndSection

--
Mark

RT3 RPM for C5
http://www.tlviewer.org/rt3


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