Install problems: Potato / boot disks 2.2.5

["Terry Katz" <katz@advanced.org>]

Hello all ..

I'm trying to get Potato (well anything) installed on a Dell PowerEdge 8450
system.  We have two AMI MegaRaid controllers in it .. I'm not sure of model
numbers, but I know that they are both supported by the MegaRaid driver in
the linux kernel (I believe one is a 16mb single channel '467' and the other
is a new 128mb dual channel .. dono the model)..  We have two 18gig cheetahs
on the single channel mirrored for the root/usr/swap filesystems.  The dual
channel has 5 drives on each channel...

The cd boots up fine (built it today, with the stock boot-floppies 2.2.5),
both raid volumes are found and install works fine through formatting and
activating of the swap partition... However, as soon as it mounts the raid
filesystems (/ and /usr), a whole slew of e2fs errors appear on the screen
(not sure the exact error, it was something about the inode-bitmap and wrong
free block count).

I can continue with the install but when it copies files to the hard drive I
get more of those errors (It gets into a loop asking me to configure device
drivers .. just keeps asking even after I install the nic drivers).

I then proceeded to try installing slink.  I have a cd I made a while back
with a custom 2.2.12 kernel with the MegaRaid drivers compiled in (we have
many poweredge's with these controllers .. so we needed a custom boot image
for installing them, since slink used a 2.0 kernel w/out the driver)  The
slink setup doesn't even happen, the kernel panics during boot :-/

So I tried a combo .. I booted off the Potato cd for the kernel and used the
root disk of slink .. I was able to format and mount the filesystem(s) fine
without errors.  However, it insisted on finding a rescue image called
resc1440-2.2.14.bin (??) and couldn't continue past the initial kernel
installation...

Any ideas ?

Thanks,
  Terry Katz