Re: debian on HP proliant
On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 02:33, Nathan Eric Norman wrote:
[...]
> > > This is true, but d-i doesn't support booting off the SmartArray
> > > because the cciss driver is a module. I already installed onto a
> > > DL360, but couldn't install a bootblock.
> >
> > I thought the point of initrd was that everything didn't need to be
> > compiled into the kernel, not even the root device. I suspect tweaking
> > the initrd image is all that would be required for a stock kernel to
> > boot. Add the module to /etc/mkinitrd/modules and re-build the initrd
> > image. Installing a standard kernel package should build the initrd
> > image for you.
>
> I'm not a d-i expert so I don't know why it didn't work, but I do know
> that d-i was unable to install grub or lilo. Given the error messages
> I got (something about "Can't determine BIOS drive number for
> /dev/cciss/disc0/disc") I figured this had something to do with the
> module vs. compiled in. If there's no boot block, it really doesn't
> matter what's in the kernel or initrd (the initrd was built correctly
> BTW).
[...]
That sounds more like a devfs problem. As you pointed out, there is the
potential for confusion between the d-i using devfs and the target not
using it. I hit this at one point with an early d-i setup (I was
fiddling with debootstrap and chroot stuff). No amount of frigging
around could convince lilo to work.
> d-i is very nice!
Was this beta-3? I found it pretty good too, provided it worked. I spent
about an hour frigging around using the floppy boot/root on an old 486
before I realised that the reason the partitioner was not working was
because the standard ide modules were on a supplementary driver disk.
The instructions indicated that these would not be required unless you
had strange network or cdrom requirements.
--
Donovan Baarda <abo@minkirri.apana.org.au>
http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
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