Sven Luther wrote:
Do you have RAID on that machine's disk ? This may be one of the problems.
RAID is supported on the machine, but not used. The nightly of march 25th has the same problem as the nightly from the 22th, i.e. it boots correctly, but the debian-installer never presents its 'initial' screen (although it is running).
Huh ? What do you mean by partitioning section ?
The place where you decide (or let the installer decide) what partitions on what disk you want. But since the detection process does not find any hard disk drives, the partitioning fails, and hence install is useless.
With nightly 20040322 it does boot the installer kernel (and I do get vc's on 2/3, etc) but the debian-installer process just sits there with a black screen and a block cursor in the lower left-hand corner.At which moment is that ?
The process list show the debian-installer is running, but it never presents anything. So, kernel loading goes fine, and init is started, but the main process started by init (debian-installer) just sits there waiting for something... killing it (or its subprocesses) off, just restarts it into the same situation ;)
Also, the early march di used the 2.4.22 kernel still, while we are using 2.4.25 now. I don't remember exactly when the change was. Can you try booting the corresponding 2.4.25 and 2.4.22 kernels, and see what it does say about your disk.
Further inspection of stuff detected by the running kernel shows that there is no problem with detection of the IDE interface (/dev/hda -> cdrom), but the IDE disk does not show up at all. Looks to me this is related to a kernel configure option, or worse, a missing/invalid driver for the IDE drives on Xserve.
The early march installer worked better in that the debian installer at least asked me things. That is not happening with the most recent builds. However, it looks like the kernel has a problem with proper detection of the disk(s) attached to the system.
Are the CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE_PMAC* enabled for the kernel?[ on a sidenote, where can I find the kernel-configs that are used by the installer kernel? ]
Regards Pepijn Oomen.