[opensuse-autoinstall] AutoInstall problems on Dell optiplex 740 & 760
Actually seen with SLED11, but I'm shooting for a wider view on the offchance that anyone is seeing this behavior in the open space too. Problem 1. The 740 It seems we have different vintages of 740. Some of the older machines have an irritating problem with a panic... http://lists4.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2009-05/msg04704.html ... which we got past, but now I seem to have an issue where some of them go through to the first boot, then come up and land at the grub> prompt. Grub can correctly identify HD(0,0) or HD(0,1) (yes, I trued moving swap & root partitions around) as being a filesystem. We watched it install... but find seems to find nothing. rebooting the system into the installer with a startshell=1, I can mount the disk in question and everything appears to be where it should be... the menu.lst looks identical to machines that work. We even tried taking memory out in case memory size was a contributor. Now, I'm not necessarily looking for a magic answer here (though I'd take one if offered). I'm looking for any ideas on how to work out what's happening. Grub isn't terribly diagnostically helpful. Problem 2. The 760 I'd installed on a 760 a number of times (testing builds) when suddenly it gakked in the partitioning section. No obvious reason why - rebooting it cleared the error. <odd>. Then it did it again. Now it's consistent. I don't know why it changed - the behavior sometimes changed with a power cycle. The 760 doesn't have a floppy - rather, it has a 4-card reader that handles SD, CF cards etc. These devices are presented as SCSI disks (albeit with no media in them). What is happening, however, is that while a manual install happily sets up /dev/sda* devices, I clone the build, try to do an autoyast and it fails. Why? Because it has now decided that the card unit "comes first", so the disk is being presented as /dev/sde with /dev/sda,b,c & d being the accursed card readers. If I change the autoyast to use /dev/sde, it cheerfully partitions, installs, then reboots and hits the wall because - yes, you guessed it. The hard drive is now presenting as /dev/sda. I can edit /etc/fstab and change it to /dev/sda, reboot, and now it continues happily. BIOS is current on this box too. I've tried fiddling with the devices in the BIOS to no avail. I'm sure that removing the card readers would fix the problem, but that's loosely like cutting off ones head to cure a headache. I've googled and binged and burned more time than I care to admit on these two... in my dreams this is going to be simple and I'll just feel stupid. That's fine, I can live with that... Constructive thoughts and suggestions most welcome. Tim (Ready to throw both machines through the nearest window) -- Tim Kirby 651-605-9074 trk@cray.com Cray Inc. Information Systems -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org
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Problem 1. The 740
It seems we have different vintages of 740. Some of the older machines have an irritating problem with a panic...
We had a few dell dying after 3 year and 10 days almost at the same time. Take a look at the caps of the condensators on the motherbord. If the top is black and bent through them away.
http://lists4.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2009-05/msg04704.html ... which we got past, but now I seem to have an issue where some of them go through to the first boot, then come up and land at the grub> prompt. Grub can correctly identify HD(0,0) or HD(0,1) (yes, I trued moving swap & root partitions around) as being a Maybe grup and mount see different disk translations - a long time ago I had a dell where for some reason the LBA ( correct word ? ) was not correct. A fdisk showed an error message. Sorry - do not remember the solution.
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Problem 2. The 760
I'd installed on a 760 a number of times (testing builds) when suddenly it gakked in the partitioning section. No obvious reason why - rebooting it cleared the error. <odd>. Then it did it again. Now it's consistent. I don't know why it changed - the behavior sometimes changed with a power cycle.
The 760 doesn't have a floppy - rather, it has a 4-card reader that handles SD, CF cards etc. These devices are presented as SCSI disks (albeit with no media in them).
Its simply the load order or availabillity of modules. I would suggest to set the bios to ide mode and load the ide driver first. (During installation via command line or info file ) To have the correct order after the installation you must change the initrd . Example from a OpenSuse 10.3 echo "INFO: task running in an chroot environment" # Tune system before first reboot - must run in chroot environment echo "INFO: rebuild initrd for EVO , DELL GX2[0-9]0 and Precsion WS boards" hwinfo --bios | egrep -iw "evo|gx2[0-9]0|WS.*360" | grep -iq "Product" if [ $? = 0 ] ; then # Load drivers to access the disk . /etc/sysconfig/kernel INITRD_MODULES="piix ide-generic ide-core ide-disk "$INITRD_MODULES perl -p -i -e "s/INITRD_MODULES=.*/INITRD_MODULES=\"$INITRD_MODULES\"/" /etc/sysconfig/kernel mkinitrd perl -p -i -e "s/resume/ insmode=ide-generic resume/" /boot/grub/menu.lst # Enable 32 IDE mode after reboot echo "hdparm -c 1 /dev/hda" >> /etc/init.d/boot.local fi
hth Hajo -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org
on Thursday 03 December 2009 Tim Kirby wrote:
What is happening, however, is that while a manual install happily sets up /dev/sda* devices, I clone the build, try to do an autoyast and it fails. Why? Because it has now decided that the card unit "comes first", so the disk is being presented as /dev/sde with /dev/sda,b,c & d being the accursed card readers. If I change the autoyast to use /dev/sde, it cheerfully partitions, installs, then reboots and hits the wall because - yes, you guessed it. The hard drive is now presenting as /dev/sda.
have you tried to use /dev/disk/... device names instead? Like /dev/disk/by-id/edd-int13_dev80 or so? I can't say if it's gonna work on your hardware but it's worth a try. -- ciao, Uwe Gansert Uwe Gansert SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Business: http://www.suse.de/~ug -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org
participants (3)
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Hans-Joachim Ehlers
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Tim Kirby
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Uwe Gansert