I'm trying to install Fedora AMD64 0.96 onto a pair of disks in a RAID-1 configuration, using the Megaraid 320-1 card. When Anaconda begins formatting partitions the cursor becomes very sluggish. The hourglass animation goes at, maybe, one third its regular speed, and the pointer noticably flickers.
tty4 is spitting out a bunch of "scsi disk error id=0 lun=0 error=40001", while all of this is going on.
This continues through the format process, and somewhere in the middle of copying the install image I get kicked back to the text mode. There are no diagnostics or error message, except for a blank, generic "install exited abnormally", and a shutdown.
Upon reboot both disks in the array are marked as bad. However the Megaraid card shows no media errors on either drive.
If I bring up the disks manually, boot into rescue mode, and use dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda[123], I can essentially wipe the entire disk without getting the disks flagged as bad. The physical disks are new, and there's every indication that there's nothing wrong with the physical disk.
And I did test the burned Fedora CDs, they are good.
Anaconda automatically brings up the megaraid driver. I've tried noprobe and manually selected megaraid2, with the same results.
The only other detail here is that the Megaraid card is in the 32 bit PCI slot. For some reason I can't boot the machine with the Megaraid card in the 64 bit slot.
I'm stumped. I can write to the entire RAID logical volume using dd, from tty2. But as soon as Anaconda starts loading stuff, errors galore.
The only other detail here is that the Megaraid card is in the 32 bit PCI slot. For some reason I can't boot the machine with the Megaraid card in the 64 bit slot.
What's kind of motherboard are you using? Have you flash your RAID card with the latest BIOS. I did so on my 320-1 card and I believe it made it compatible with the latest driver.
-eric wood
Eric Wood writes:
The only other detail here is that the Megaraid card is in the 32 bit PCI slot. For some reason I can't boot the machine with the Megaraid card in the 64 bit slot.
What's kind of motherboard are you using? Have you flash your RAID card with the latest BIOS. I did so on my 320-1 card and I believe it made it compatible with the latest driver.
It's an Accelertech ATO2161 dual-Opteron motherboard. I just flashed the 320-1 to the latest BIOS, also flashed the latest BIOS to the motherboard, and it made no difference. The partitions format OK, but as soon as it begins copying the packages, a slew of disk errors come out on tty4, and the install aborts.
I'm wondering whether this has anything to do with me putting the 320-1 card into a 32-bit PCI slot, because that's the only way I could get the machine to boot at all. If I put the card into one of the 64bit slots, the machine does not survive the POST.
Although this does point to a hardware issue, I note that I can format the RAID partitions, and I can manually use dd to write over the entire partition without reporting any errors whatsoever. It's only when Anaconda starts installing stuff does all the hell break loose.
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Eric Wood -
Sam Varshavchik