SuperMicro H8DA8/H8DAR motherboard
Has anyone had success loading SUSE Linux on a SuperMicro H8DA8/H8DAR AMD dual processor 2.4 GHZ? It has an ATI Rage 8-MB XL Graphics Chip Adaptec RAID V4.30 AIC7902 Ultra 320 Wide The machine sounds like a jet engine and is hard on my ears as it is designed for rack mounting (1U) pizza box design, in a relay rack cabinet. It installs normally up to the first reboot where you put in the root password and user stuff etc. providing more detail describing how it fails but just At that point it always fails with no GUI coming up and to many processes keeping getty from running, so does Ubuntu. I did once or twice succeed in installing the machine as a bare bones server with no GUI, text only. I am fishing at this point to see if anyone has one of these boxes and has failed or succeeded. I can install SLAX which is a LIVE CD ok. Cheers, Bob
-----Original Message----- From: Robert Lewis [mailto:rll@felton.felton.ca.us] Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 2:34 PM To: Suse-Linux-E (E-mail) Subject: [SLE] SuperMicro H8DA8/H8DAR motherboard
Has anyone had success loading SUSE Linux on a SuperMicro H8DA8/H8DAR AMD dual processor 2.4 GHZ? It has an ATI Rage 8-MB XL Graphics Chip Adaptec RAID V4.30 AIC7902 Ultra 320 Wide The machine sounds like a jet engine and is hard on my ears as it is designed for rack mounting (1U) pizza box design, in a relay rack cabinet.
It installs normally up to the first reboot where you put in the root password and user stuff etc. providing more detail describing how it fails but just At that point it always fails with no GUI coming up and to many processes keeping getty from running, so does Ubuntu.
I did once or twice succeed in installing the machine as a bare bones server with no GUI, text only. I am fishing at this point to see if anyone has one of these boxes and has failed or succeeded.
I can install SLAX which is a LIVE CD ok.
I installed onto a 3ware raid card using that board, no internal SCSI. I've got mine in a 3u Super Micro case, and it's relatively quiet. -Alain.
This was very valuable information for me. As a result of your feedback I pulled out the SCSI drive and substituted with long enough cables to get outside the case an IDE hard drive. For the first time in over a month of experimentation I have succeeded in a stable SUSE 10.1 64-bit OS. Amazing! All patches downloaded too. Now I need to turn back and figure out why the SCSI installation is failing after the first reboot. So if anyone has comments, then I am all ears. I will probably call SuperMicro the MBO manufacture to see what they say as well. Cheers, Bob
SuperMicro gave me a long list of things to look for with regards to SCSI. None of their suggestions have actually helped. Bottom line is that this MBO has an onboard Adaptec AIC 7902 Ultra 320 Wide SCSI adapter connected to a Seagate ST 373297LC. RAID is turned off. Does anyone have the above Adaptec card working properly with SUSE 10.1. It loads fine up to the first reboot where one is requested to set the root and user passwords. At that point scrolling off the screen are 100's of messages that look like: /etc/initscript: line 106: /sbin/mingetty: input/output error INIT: ID5 mingetty respawning too fast No more processes left in this runlevel. I also see the INIT line appearing for ID1, IU2, ID6 I supect that the Adaptec Driver is not happy. Any thoughts from all you very smart people?
On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 13:17 -0700, Robert Lewis wrote:
SuperMicro gave me a long list of things to look for with regards to SCSI. None of their suggestions have actually helped.
Bottom line is that this MBO has an onboard Adaptec AIC 7902 Ultra 320 Wide SCSI adapter connected to a Seagate ST 373297LC. RAID is turned off. Does anyone have the above Adaptec card working properly with SUSE 10.1.
It loads fine up to the first reboot where one is requested to set the root and user passwords. At that point scrolling off the screen are 100's of messages that look like: /etc/initscript: line 106: /sbin/mingetty: input/output error INIT: ID5 mingetty respawning too fast No more processes left in this runlevel.
I also see the INIT line appearing for ID1, IU2, ID6
I supect that the Adaptec Driver is not happy.
Any thoughts from all you very smart people?
You might try booting to the install media again and then tell it to boot the installed system which might load a missing driver. Also try adding the SCSI driver to the list of drivers loaded at boot and run mkinitrd to add it to the boot image. YMMV. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998
I have tried some other versions of Linux and nothing seems to work on this machine. SLAX does load but it is ignoring the SCSI bus so doesn't see this chipset and SCSI drive. I tried booting from the install media and then told it to boot the installed system but continue to get the same error. It wasn't clear to me how to add the SCSI driver as I don't have any control over the machine at this point. Also, SUSE 10.1 apparently choose to install the SCSI driver because not only do I get through the entire installation writing to the harddrive but when it boots the first time it is actually loading the kernel of the harddrive but then I get so many errors that the machine becomes unusable immediately prior to being able to put in the root and user passwords after the first reboot. What I am beginning to suspect is one of the following: 1) Defective AIC-7902W onboard chip 2) In proper SCSI termination based on a lack of understanding on my part 3) Bad Adaptec Driver code for this chipset on Linux /usr/src/linux-2.6xxx/drivers/scsi/aic7xxx/aic79xx* seems to be version 3.0 It would be nice to know if anyone has succeeded with 10.1 and an onborad AIC-7902W chip?
-----Original Message----- From: Robert Lewis [mailto:rll@felton.felton.ca.us] Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2006 1:17 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] SuperMicro H8DA8/H8DAR motherboard
SuperMicro gave me a long list of things to look for with regards to SCSI. None of their suggestions have actually helped.
Bottom line is that this MBO has an onboard Adaptec AIC 7902 Ultra 320 Wide SCSI adapter connected to a Seagate ST 373297LC. RAID is turned off. Does anyone have the above Adaptec card working properly with SUSE 10.1.
I have the version of the mother board without the on-board SCSI card, so I can't answer that one. I did some searching and found a post from someone that was trying out a new driver for the 7902 that was trying to fix an issue with a Seagate drive (different model number, so I'm not sure if it applies or not). The person says that the problem on happens in SMP mode. Have you tried temporarily disabling or removing one of the CPU's? The link that I found is http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=104800320020141&w=2 Best of luck, -Alain.
Thanks for this info. and help. I got pretty excited being given something to try. Everything looks good, mouse, GUI during installation it is just that after first reboot to finish up I never return to a GUI mode and eventually the screen fills up with errors. I can go into safe mode and YaST queries me for a few more items before the screen again fills up. I tried adding to the boot line: nosmp and on another attempt maxcpus=0 which does the same thing but still had problems. I have tried all acpi=off nolapic and some others but I don't get the prize. Question: I haven't wanted to pull out the second CPU itself as yet. Based on my earlier attempt to boot with "nosmp" is that worth a try?
-----Original Message----- From: Robert Lewis [mailto:rll@felton.felton.ca.us] Sent: Monday, August 21, 2006 2:56 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] SuperMicro H8DA8/H8DAR motherboard
Thanks for this info. and help. I got pretty excited being given something to try. Everything looks good, mouse, GUI during installation it is just that after first reboot to finish up I never return to a GUI mode and eventually the screen fills up with errors. I can go into safe mode and YaST queries me for a few more items before the screen again fills up. I tried adding to the boot line: nosmp and on another attempt maxcpus=0 which does the same thing but still had problems. I have tried all acpi=off nolapic and some others but I don't get the prize.
I don't know why this never occurred to me to ask, or perhaps you answered it already and I just forgot. When you're doing the install, are you updating at all? If yes, do the install without the update and see if it works. It could be something as simple as the SCSI driver not being compatible with a new kernel that gets loaded during the update. I've had that problem with the 3Ware card that I'm using in this system.
Question: I haven't wanted to pull out the second CPU itself as yet. Based on my earlier attempt to boot with "nosmp" is that worth a try?
Is your current CPU dual core? Like I said, I'm having great luck with the non-SCSI version of this board and am using it for Oracle ERP validation in preparation of a migration from UNIX to SLES9. -Alain
Alain Black wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Robert Lewis [mailto:rll@felton.felton.ca.us] Sent: Monday, August 21, 2006 2:56 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] SuperMicro H8DA8/H8DAR motherboard
Thanks for this info. and help. I got pretty excited being given something to try. Everything looks good, mouse, GUI during installation it is just that after first reboot to finish up I never return to a GUI mode and eventually the screen fills up with errors. I can go into safe mode and YaST queries me for a few more items before the screen again fills up. I tried adding to the boot line: nosmp and on another attempt maxcpus=0 which does the same thing but still had problems. I have tried all acpi=off nolapic and some others but I don't get the prize.
I don't know why this never occurred to me to ask, or perhaps you answered it already and I just forgot. When you're doing the install, are you updating at all?
If yes, do the install without the update and see if it works. It could be something as simple as the SCSI driver not being compatible with a new kernel that gets loaded during the update. I've had that problem with the 3Ware card that I'm using in this system.
Question: I haven't wanted to pull out the second CPU itself as yet. Based on my earlier attempt to boot with "nosmp" is that worth a try?
Is your current CPU dual core?
Like I said, I'm having great luck with the non-SCSI version of this board and am using it for Oracle ERP validation in preparation of a migration from UNIX to SLES9.
-Alain
Thanks for the added feedback. All installs have been fresh installs. The CPU's are two AMD 250 Opteron 2.4 GHZ 64-bit. They each have their own heatsink of course. When I plug in an IDE drive everything installs without a hitch. Today I borrowed another SCSI drive, different brand, and for the first time installed but with a few error messages and it switched to non-GUI mode YaST2 after the first reboot to complete. Tomorrow I'll try d/l all the patches which has a new kernel and see what happens. Then on to trying to bypass the SCSI backplane which can hold three SCSI Drives. If that doesn't give me some clarity then I'll try a SCSI card and cable.
Folks: I am a bit red faced over this one. It turned out to be an intermittent SCSI hard drive causing all my problems. It is difficult to trouble shoot hardware when you don't have replacements handy to swap in. I got very lucky on this one as the warantee on the bad hard drive ran out the very day I contacted Seagate about replacing it. Just go in under the wire. The replacement drive arrived late this afternoon and the installation went as smooth as butter. Cheers, Bob
participants (3)
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Alain Black -
Ken Schneider -
Robert Lewis