MSI K8N Neo Platinum Installation Report & GRUB/LILO troubles
Hi everyone,
I recently bought the following system:
- AMD64 3200+ (socket 754)
- MSI K8N Neo Platinum
- 2x 300GB Seagate 7200.8 SATA hard drives
- 2x 512MB OCZ DDR PC3200
- DVD/CD writer NEC ND-3520A
- a couple of more things
I started my journey having in mind to install the Sid's Debian
pure64, and knowing I might (or might not) have some problems doing
it, as this motherboard isn't in the supported/tested k8 motherboards
list.
Altough I had Sid in mind, I started to burn the latest netinst iso
from from Sarge since it was a newer (20/03/2005). Well, it didn't
work, and it seemed to me that the nforce3 250 was not properly
handled, possibly because it might use a kernel prior to the
nforce3-250_trouble_free_2.6.10. I have to say I found it odd the date
was not actualized (it showed 17/03/2004 when pressing <F1> in the
bootloader).
I then proceeded with the sid-amd64-netinst.iso. It also failed due to
a problem a already saw when scouring throught the Debian AMD64 ML. It
detects my SATA disks, but...
nv_sata: Primary device added
nv_sata: Primary device removed
nv_sata: Secondary device added
nv_sata: Secondary device removed
nv_sata: Primary device added
so I failed to install it once again. I hadn't really noticed that
this image was older than the other ones, so I burned the
sid-amd64-monolithic.iso. Guess what, I only got to the network driver
install, as my gigabit ethernet (controled by nforce) was not
recognized.
I must say I was getting frustrated and disappointed. At that time I
thought I should try something different, and I tried the "Debian From
Scratch" CD, but the kernel version was too old. Instead of doing one
from scratch I remembered one post in the ML about chrooting from a
Ubuntu Live CD, and downloaded it during the night.
Well, in the morning I had a problem with Ubuntu Live CD. If, during
the "Enter the preinstalled system", the CD has already stopped
rotating (because it wasn't read in awhile), it failed to proceed.
After some tries I was able to pass through that phase and do a init 1
(altough I was pleasently suprised to know that the X detected my new
Nvidia 6600GT!).
So, finally, I got a shell with network connection and fdisk was
seeing my disks! Yeah B) ! The next step was to put the correct debian
line to /etc/apt/sources.list :
deb http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/pure64 sid main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/pure64 sid main
contrib non-free
and did a 'apt-get update'. It whined about the checksum but I just
followed through. I then did a 'apt-get install cdebootstrap' as it
wasn't available.
In the meantime I made the partitions for one of the disks (I thought
at the time that I should do the RAID 1 I intended, after I had a
booting system). Afterwards, I used mkfs.ext3 to create the filesystem
in the partitions, and mounted the root one on /mnt/ (I also copied
/etc/resolv.conf to /mnt/etc/).
As stated in the documentation I used cdebootstrap (what's the
difference to debootstrap anyway?):
# cdebootstrap --arch amd64 sid /pure64/
http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/pure64/
and went out to get something to eat!
After lunch, I started by copying the /boot/ directory to my /boot
partition. I also chrooted and mounted the other partitions moving
contents of already created directories:
# cd /mnt/
# chroot .
# mount /dev/sda1 /boot/ # I don't remember if I had
to create the dir!
# mkdir /home/
# mount /dev/sda2 /home
# mv /var/ /var2 ; mkdir /var ; mount /dev/hda6 /var/ ; mv /var2/*
/var ; rm -r /var2
# mksawp /dev/sda3
# swapon
By this time I created the file /etc/fstab with my correct partitions
and proc (which I initialized).
# mkdir proc
# mount -t proc none proc
Finally:
# base-config
installed me the base system. So far so good (kind of :P ). My main
(unsolved) problems began when I tried to to install GRUB.
As stated in the /usr/share/doc/grub/README.debian.gz I tried to
install grub with:
# grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/sda
but, after a minute I got:
grub-install /dev/sda
> > /sbin/grub-install: line 475: 4041 Segmentation fault $grub_shell --batch $no_floppy --device-map=$device_map >$log_file <<EOF
> > root $root_drive
> > setup $force_lba --stage2=$grubdir/stage2 --prefix=$grub_prefix $install_drive
> > quit
> > EOF
I also saw a fatal error in the end that I didn't write down :( (and
I'm not near my computer right now), about the device map, but the
file device.map seems ok!! I couldn't solve this issue.
LILO Time!!
After an 'apt-get install lilo', I configured /etc/lilo.conf and ran
lilo. It protested about my /proc/partitions, but I don't have the
output of it. The first line was:
Warning: '/proc/partitions' does not match '/dev' directory structure.
though. It then gave about a dozen line refering to blocks in /dev/...
I also did not get the usual "Added Linux *" last line.
And that's it! That's where I'm standing right now. I actually didn't
turn off the computer, and I'm thinking of using the parameter
'--recheck' with GRUB and test it again.
Any hints on how to install a bootloader sucessfully?
Regards,
--
Ricardo Diz
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