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Woody + Dell PowerEdge = disaster.



I'd like to rant about woody instalation process.

Last  Wednesday,  we  decided to install woody on our PowerEdge 4100. It
had a fast install of potato, some of  our  early  experiments  entitled
'will  debian install on this?' We booted from rescuecd [1], run cfdisk,
partitioned /dev/sda - which is RAID5, and booted into instalation cd of
woody.

 It doesn't seem to see /dev/sda.

 Yes, it recognized scsi0 and scsi1, but no RAID.

 We tried booting from rescuecd. Something was wrong, and we got crc er-
ror. Ok, so it is unusable. Maybe we shall make floppies? root,  rescue.
Go.  Ooops, no megaraid support in kernel. Let's grep config... aha! Mo-
dule!. But we ran out of good floopies too. Too bad.

 Ok, we shall boot from the cd, and use our two floppies to give him mo-
dules. Simple? No. PowerEdge's BIOS has messed something up (during boot
it  says  that since we want to boot from CD, it makes it A: floppy, and
B: is the old drive), and in conclusion, both /dev/fd0 and /dev/fd1  are
unreadable. Invalid argument, kernel said. Well.

 Finally,  we created a ramdisc, untarred the modules there, and modpro-
bed. Cool. Instalator is aware of /dev/sda. Great! So, let's  make  sure
it creates initrd with megaraid, in order to boot properly.

 It didn't. 

 Again, ramdisc, untar, make proper initrd by hand. Load. Run lilo.

 Now it boots.
 
 Question: why on earth there are no untarred modules on the CD? It is a
*compact disc*, big load of free space, why there's only .bin and  .tgz?
It would save me some work then.

Regards,

Q.

[1] http://rescuecd.sf.net/
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