Continuing problems with installer and Sager 9880
I'm trying to install Debian on a new Sager 9880, thus far with no good
results. All attempts fail at the partman step with "no partitionable
media. The unit has twin SATA disks with a Promise SATA378 TX2Plus scsi
controller. I've tried 3 different installers:
1. Official Sarge installation dvd's, 5/28 version, downloaded via
jigdo and burned.
2. Custom monolithic mini installer built with custom build of the
latest 2.6.12-rc6 kernel with everything modularized per normal
installer requirements
3. Custom netboot mini installer, built with another custom build of
the 2.6.12-rc6 kernel that has all required components for the Sager
built in and no modules.
All 3 successfully configure the network, acpi and card services, but
fail at the partman step unable to find the hard drives.
I have some concerns about each of the 3 approaches tried so far:
1. Both the 2.4 and 2.6.8 kernels on the official installers,
according to other postings I've Googled, have problems in libata and
sata_promise with my controller. This is why I've tried 2.6.12-rc6
which shows full support for this controller in the current libata status.
2. The monolithic mini install successfully loads the essential
modules (especially sata_promise), but complains that ide-mod is
required but unavailable to be loaded. Might this be required? It is
on the cd as a module -- why might it be unavailable? Also, I was
surprised that the monolithic target is commented out of the build
script for debian-installer (pulled from subversion trunk this past
Saturday). I uncommented it and it built fine (after mucking with
modules and packages for 2.6.12-rc6...). Is it commented out because it
is broken in some way?
3. The netboot mini installer shows the wrong configuration in
/proc/config.gz, i.e. not the configuration I built the kernel with.
However, I'm pretty sure the correct kernel was used as no modules were
created and it correctly installed and configured my network card
(Realtek gigabit, the driver for which is built-in to this kernel), as
well as my acpi and card services (all required modules built-in to the
netboot kernel only). To build the netboot mini, I eliminated all
module lists from debian-installer and kernel-wedge, except for
kernel-image, and reduced the package lists also to only kernel-image.
This seemed to work fine -- is there some reason perhaps it produced a
bad result? Also, all of the following modules show as unvailable (a
few of the same ones also show as unavailable in the monolithic mini):
a. i810_rng (also unavailable in monolithic mini; Intel 82801 PCI
Bridge). I cannot find this module anywhere in the kernel. Anyone know
where to find it?
b. sata_promise (unavailable only in netboot, not in monolithic
mini where it does show as loaded). It is built into the netboot
kernel. Might it still show as unavailable even if it is working properly?
c. usb-storage (not built-in to netbuilt kernel -- should not be
needed)
d. ide-core, ide-mod, ide-probe-mode, ide-detect, ide-generic,
ide-floppy, ide-disk, ide-cd (all that are available in the kernel are
built into the netboot kernel)
e. isofs (built in to netboot kernel and working)
f. sr_mod (scsi cdrom) ???
Does anyone have any suggestions on next steps or how to get past this
impasse? In particularly, how might I diagnose at a finer granularity
why partman is failing. The only interesting messages in the logs are
these:
File descriptor 3 left open
File descriptor 4 left open
File descriptor 5 left open
File descriptor 6 left open
No matching physical volumes found
File descriptor 3 left open
File descriptor 4 left open
File descriptor 5 left open
File descriptor 6 left open
No volume groups found
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
These same messages occur in the logs with all 3 installers.
Thanks for any tips,
Chuck
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