Re: Almost there
OK, where do I start...
Mike Reinehr wrote:
On Monday 18 July 2005 05:52 pm, Gary Hodges wrote:
<snip> ...
/dev/sda1 (/boot) is ext2 and all the other partitions are ReiserFS.
I'm using the standard kernel included with the debian installer. Note
that I'm not using what is considered to be the stable installer, but a
daily build I found somewhere. It is build 7-6-2005. The stable
installer doesn't see the on-board NIC. I believe all the installers
are using the same kernel (2.6.8-11). I don't know if initrd was
created correctly. Is there a way to test it?
It's looking as if GRUB is not the problem, which leaves the initrd. The
short answer to your question is "I don't know." The long answer is that it
might be documented in /usr/share/doc/kernel ... I would think that if the
installer allowed you to create a ReiserFS file system, that the kernel &
initrd supplied with the installer would be capable of mounting it, but
stranger things have happened.
At this point, I have two thoughts. First, it's time to go home, have a beer
and a good night's sleep & work on this again, in the morning -- which is
what I'm about to do!
I was way ahead of you on heading home!
My second thought is to fire-up Knoppix again. Chroot into /dev/sda2.
Mount /dev/sda1 as boot on /dev/sda2 and then install another, more current
kernel or, even, compile your own with make-kpkg. But, if you're not familiar
with all this, this too would be better left until tomorrow.
This is where I started this morning. I actually tried this a lot the
past couple of days, but was never able to get chroot to work. Googling
around today I found a comment about having to use a 64 bit live CD for
64 bit installs. Makes perfect sense, but that rather important point
was left off by all the folks who suggested chroot previously. I'm sure
a certain level of knowledge was assumed :-).
So, I now have sarge installed on this machine. This install took me
close to five full days. Ran into some bugs, lots of small steps made
until it finally worked. Below are the steps distilled down a bit. I
don't by any means claim this is the most concise way, but it worked for
me. I repeated all of these this morning just to make sure it would
work a second time.
Hardware refresher for those searching:
Tyan K8WE w/2x Opteron 244s
LSI21320RB SCSI Controller
Plextor PX-716SA (SATA)
1. Install with a beta version of the sarge installer. I searched
through the Debian amd64 mailing list archives and found a kind person
hosting the older installer. I think what makes it special is it used
the 2.6.10 kernel before the installer team reverted back to 2.6.8. The
stable installer didn't see my SCSI controller. The beta doesn't see
the on-board NIC so you have to temporarily install an older NIC. The
beta installer has a bug in grub. The K8WE board also has a BIOS bug (I
have the newest BIOS installed). It won't cascade down the boot list to
find bootable media or drives. You have to set the CDROM as first,
then change that to SCSI drive after installing. Oh, nothing ever sees
the SATA Plextor drive so you have to temporarily install an IDE drive.
2. After installing boot the system with (I used) an Ubuntu live 64
CD. Then you can chroot. My steps were:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot
etc.
chroot /mnt
Add sid to your sources list and "apt-get update." Then you can install
the newest kernel and headers which today was 2.6.11-9. There was an
error that suggested mounting /proc as well. Did that and it worked fine.
3. Because of that bug in grub I then boot the machine with Knoppix (a
32 bit version). OK, so I wasn't patient enough to figure out what I
was doing wrong in Ubuntu. Like I said, I never claimed these were the
most concise steps. Once booted into Knoppix (3.9 I think):
mount /dev/sda2 /boot
grub-install /dev/sda
4. Reboot the machine moving your Cat5 plug to the first on-board NIC.
You will now be presented with a lovely grub boot menu. Oh, don't
forget to change the boot order in your BIOS to the SCSI drive first.
Freaking BIOS bug. Anyway... The machine should now boot up OK and go
into the usual configuration process. I ran into one more glitch where
after downloading all the packages the process hung. I rebooted and
followed the steps again and everything worked fine. At this point X
isn't working, but I'll get that figured out. I'm just really happy to
finally have sarge installed on this beast.
Oh, last week I did install Ubuntu on the machine and the Plextor SATA
drive was found and worked fine, so I'm guessing I'll be able to get
that to work with a little experimentation.
Thanks much to everyone who took the time to respond to my posts on
this. I hope what I've outlined above will help someone else with this
or similar hardware.
Cheers,
Gary
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