5.2-RELEASE TODO

[Eric Anderson]

Tom wrote:

>On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Eric Anderson wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Tom wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>> Just to be complete, there are already a whole bunch of machines that
>>>will not boot 5.x, irregardless of the ACPI issues.  I've never been able
>>>to boot 5.x with ACPI on or off, on any of the 5 Dell PowerEdge 6350
>>>servers I have here, even though they run 4.9 perfectly.  I have a PR open
>>>on it.
>>>
>>> So even without the ACPI issues on some hardware, there are still other
>>>reasons why 5.x is going to fail to boot.
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Are you using a PERC in those boxes?  I've seen issues with PERC
>>controllers on 5.1, but 4.8 worked fine.  I received a patch, which
>>fixed it, but it's a bit hard to install the os, and then rebuild world
>>without rebooting the machine. :)
>>    
>>
>
>  Well, there are so many kinds of PERC cards.  Some are just Mylex cards.
>Others are MegaRAID.  I think they use some Adaptec now.
>
My troubles were with the MegaRAID variant, I'm not sure about the others..

>  Either way, I tried booting the install CD with all cards disconnected,
>just to see if I could get the installer up to the main menu.  No go.  The
>display switches off as soon as sysinstall starts probing devices.  It
>appears to panic, but the display is dead.  Once I was able to use
>scrolllock at the critical moment just before the kernel starts
>sysinstall, and prevent the display from switch off, but when I release
>the scroll lock, I was at the DDB prompt.  Not good.
>  
>
First - I hope you mean the cards are physically OUT of the machine - it 
seemed to me that if they had a logical disk configuration on the card, 
it would hang.  Although, it sounds like your problem is different.  
Actually, it kind of sounds like it thinks you are doing the "-p" boot 
thing to check for keyboard and roll over to the serial port.  Other 
than that, I'm out of ideas (doesn't take long for that to happen 
though!).. :(

Eric



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Eric Anderson	   Systems Administrator      Centaur Technology
All generalizations are false, including this one.
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