Problems installing on Dell R310
mat brown
Dell Poweredge R310
Intel Xeon X3440 quad core, 8GB RAM, etc. Storage is four 500GB
drives, hardware RAID1 so shows up as two 500GB drives to the system.
H/W controller is SAS1068e, Broadcom NIC, everything else is Intel
chips.
I want RAID10, so am doing s/w RAID0 during install using both
drives. I have a non-raid /boot partition. All f/s are ext3. Squeeze
and Lenny both want the non-free NIC drivers on a usb stick,
but otherwise both install without reported error. For the purposes
of this question, I'm using Squeeze (but Lenny behaves the exact same
way, as does the most recent Ubuntu LTS)
No matter what combination of LVM, s/w RAID, no s/w RAID, no LVM or
whatever I use, GRUB refuses to boot the installed system. Sometimes
I get a "GRUB" prompt, but most of the time nothing at all past
POST. No error messages are generated during the install process. If
I boot a recovery console and try to manually install grub it
sometimes works, sometimes fails with an assortment of errors, the
googling of which gets me roughly nowhere. Even if grub thinks it's
installed, on reboot it fails as above.
I've tried pinning grub to 'experimental', I've tried downgrading to
grub-legacy, I've added a rootdelay to let the RAID spin up, I've even
tried lilo! No joy.
I did find a few mentions of older versions of grub having a few bugs
which relate to not booting off s/w RAID devices, but those bugs have
been fixed a while ago as far as I can tell. But even if that were
the problem, installing with no RAID/LVM should work - which it
doesn't.
The most recent install attempt I've made had an empty /boot directory
(despite /vmlinuz.* etc symlinking into there). I had to install a
previous kernel version before I got System.map, config, vmlinuz etc
in there, and manually running grub-update, grub-install, created
right-looking device.map, menu.lst and so on. Now everything *looks*
right, it just doesn't *work*
Centos installs fine. But I don't know rpm-based distros well enough
to do what I need to do down the line, and anyway - this is Debian for
goodness sakes! I've installed loads of Debian systems just fine.
Any advice, pointers, useful cursewords or anything would be hugely
appreciated. Two weeks now I've been going around in circles and I've
got a heck of a headache now!
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Eero Volotinen
> OK, this is a fun one. I recently took delivery of a new server, a
> Dell Poweredge R310
try to install with http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ (unofficial debian installer)
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Eero
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mat brown
> try to install withhttp://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/(unofficial debian installer)
>
I did consider that, but seeing as I've installed both Lenny and
Squeeze (not to mention Ubuntu LTS) OK, I'm not sure that it will
help: it's not actually installing that's the problem. It's booting
the system after install, and the d-i images - to the best of my
knowledge - use the same version of grub as Lenny official does. Plus
I'd rather so my software RAID in Squeeze if at all possible.
I will, of course, try - when I can get a CD burnt down at the
datacentre. Thanks very much for the suggestion.
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Eero Volotinen
>>
>> try to install withhttp://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/(unofficial debian installer)
>>
>
> I did consider that, but seeing as I've installed both Lenny and
> Squeeze (not to mention Ubuntu LTS) OK, I'm not sure that it will
> help: it's not actually installing that's the problem. It's booting
> the system after install, and the d-i images - to the best of my
> knowledge - use the same version of grub as Lenny official does. Plus
> I'd rather so my software RAID in Squeeze if at all possible.
>
> I will, of course, try - when I can get a CD burnt down at the
> datacentre. Thanks very much for the suggestion.
I had similar problems with R410. I think problem lies in way DRAC
card is recognized at boot and it's virtual drives.
Of course you can unplug the drac.. eh :)
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mat brown
> Of course you can unplug the drac.. eh :)
>
As far as I can tell (lspci, lsusb, dmesg|grep drac) there's no drac
installed. the KVM access I have is through the hosting provider's
own system - again, as far as I can tell.
I know Dell don't officially support debian, but even so.
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Bob Proulx
> No matter what combination of LVM, s/w RAID, no s/w RAID, no LVM or
> whatever I use, GRUB refuses to boot the installed system.
> the problem, installing with no RAID/LVM should work - which it
> doesn't.
I know you mention several things but just to be clear... You did try
an install using nothing more than /dev/sda as the root partition with
everything all in one partition? No software raid. No lvm. That
would be the simplest case. If that fails what is on the screen at
that time?
I wasn't 100% positive that such a simple trial had been made and had
also failed to get booted and so decided to ask.
> Centos installs fine. But I don't know rpm-based distros well enough
> to do what I need to do down the line, and anyway - this is Debian for
> goodness sakes! I've installed loads of Debian systems just fine.
Agreed! But that is a good clue just the same. Installs and boots?
If so then you should be able to do an A-B comparison to figure out
the difference. Or at the least use one to boot the other.
Bob
Chris Davies
> I had similar problems with R410. I think problem lies in way DRAC
> card is recognized at boot and it's virtual drives.
I too have had problems in this area on DELL systems with a DRAC. Without
reference to my notes I'm relying on memory, but the bottom line is that
during installation there is an extra drive visible to the OS.
For example, my (legacy) grub menu.lst entries would have had something
like "root=/dev/sdb5" but after installation these would have needed
correcting to "root=/dev/sda5".
Chris
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mat brown
> an install using nothing more than /dev/sda as the root partition with
> everything all in one partition? No software raid. No lvm. That
> would be the simplest case. If that fails what is on the screen at
> that time?
Perfectly reasonable question. :)
I have tried this, yes. In this case, like most others, I get nothing
past POST - no "GRUB", no error messages, no anything. If I fire up
the bios boot manager, I get a mere blinking cursor after telling it
to boot from the hard drive - just as if there were no system, nor
bootloader, installed. It's really weird.
> Agreed! But that is a good clue just the same. Installs and boots?
> If so then you should be able to do an A-B comparison to figure out
> the difference. Or at the least use one to boot the other.
Centos installs and boots just fine. It uses an LVM as it's default
disk setup, unlike my preferred s/w RAID0, but apart from that - the
GRUB config looks the same. It looks *normal* - I can just about
write a default grub 0.97 menu.lst manually if I have to.
I don't want an LVM as RAID0 gives considerably better I/O performance
and disk I/O is what I need this machine to be good at.
Using Centos to bootstrap Debian is exactly the kind of mess I'd
rather not get into on what will, ultimately, be my main server. But
if that's what it takes...
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