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Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« on: August 05, 2004, 10:55:15 PM »
We're trying to install SME 6.0.1 on an SATA RAID.  (We do want to boot SME from the RAID.) The board is an Abit KV8-Max3.

Motherboard Link:  http://www.Abit-USA.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=150

There are three SATA drives in the system.  Two are on SATA-1 and SATA-2, which are controlled by VIA's "on chip" RAID BIOS, and set to operate in RAID-1.  The third drive is on SATA-4, SATA-3 to -6 are controlled by the "on board" Silicon Image RAID BIOS.

The board has two RAID BIOS:  An "on chip" one which controls two SATA slots, and an "on board" one which controls four other SATA slots.  We're not yet sure why the board has two RAID BIOS.

The third drive is a spare that we plan to use as a hot swap backup of the RAID.

The SME 6.0.1 installation CD boots and does not find any of the hard drives. (However, we do notice some lines that read "Autodetecting RAID" as the CD boots.)  The respective RAID BIOS do each see the drives connected to them.

So, the SME install suggests "you probably want to manually select drivers."  We choose "Yes", but it just starts running Anaconda and goes to the screens that ask to select a language, keyboard type, and agree to the license.  After agreeing to the license, a message then comes up that complains that it could not find any "valid devices to install a file system".

The VIA RAID chipset is VT8237.  VIA provides RAID drivers for various versions of Linux here:

http://www.ViaArena.com/?PageID=297#raid

The Silicon Image chipset is Sil 3114:

http://www.SiImage.com/products/sii3114.asp

We think everything we need to get this working is available.  However, it appears that a bug is preventing SME from acting properly after it suggests manually selecting drivers.

We also suspect that we will likely need to somehow create a custom install CD with the appropriate drivers on it.

If anyone has any ideas, we would appreciate them.  If you know of related links, please post them here.  We searched the forum and found some discussions that were close, but found nothing complete.

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2004, 02:15:31 AM »
We just booted the Fedora Core 1 Installation CD.  It showed the same message, "You probably want to manually select a driver."

Unlike SME, when we selected "Yes" it did show a menu where we could add additional drivers.

This indicates a very strong likelihood that the SME 6.0.1 Installer does in fact contain a bug in this part of the install process.

Any ideas on how to work-around or perhaps fix this bug?

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2004, 04:40:28 AM »
We have submitted a bug report regard this:

http://no.longer.valid/mantis/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000102

Any ideas from the forum community are still welcome.

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2004, 05:03:07 AM »
If anyone wants to try to reproduce this bug, a possible way to test for it is to disconnect all hard drives from a system before booting the SME Installation CD.

Offline frederikbay

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Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #4 on: August 06, 2004, 10:16:53 AM »
just a thought

have you tried to hold leftshift key down as you sme cd starts booting or control-c out if the initial install.

this will give you a promt where you type:

accept dd

and the installation will ask you for a driver disk later on.

Frederik

Offline satovey

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Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #5 on: August 06, 2004, 08:28:23 PM »
It's amazing what you find when your
not looking for it. I was on the
PcChips website looking for a bios
upgrade and this is what I found:)

I tried it and the sucker booted from
the cd. You might what to try it and
see if this is the same issue with
your system.

44. Why does it crash when I try to install Red Hat Linux?
Many people have tried to install Red Hat Linux 7.2 and found that the installer crashes with a kernel panic. This can be resolved by disabling ACPI/APM in the BIOS prior to installing Red Hat. This can be re-enabled after installation if required. Also, ensure that the CD drive that you are installing from is jumpered to either "master" or "slave", and not "cable select".

Some people who find that Red Hat gets confused when using the onboard VGA (shared memory). The fix is to use the following command "boot: linux mem=64m" when booting from the first CD.

When installing XFree86, it may pay for you to use the command "Xconfigurator --noddcprobe" to prevent crashing. Some people find the alternative VGA driver from http://www.webit.at/~twinny/linuxsis630.shtml better than the default.

I personally have had no such problems with crashes or with X when installing Linux on my machine. This is probably due to the fact that I use Debian GNU/Linux!


Have a good day:)

Scott
Scott A Tovey

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #6 on: August 06, 2004, 10:25:32 PM »
Frederik,

We have created a linux driver disk using the following driver:

ftp://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/Linux/VIA_RAID_Linux_V03K7.zip
http://downloads.viaarena.com/LinuxApplicationNotes/Aug03/VIA%20RH7.2%20SATA%20Device%20ver0.8.gz

Holding down "left shift" during boot causes the "boot:" prompt to appear.  We type "accept dd" and hit [enter].  The next screen that comes up is a new driver disk screen.  We follow the prompts to read the driver off the floppy disk.

Unfortunately, after that the sequence is exactly the same as before.  It doesn't seem to use the driver, and does not bring up a window that will actually allow the manual selectino of the driver.

satovey,

We're not seeing any crashing or kernel panic.  The installer is just not showing a dialog that it should be -- just an annoying bug.

Offline satovey

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Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #7 on: August 07, 2004, 03:23:14 AM »
Hi Jeremy,

After rereading the post, I think I can
lead you in the right direction. First,
you need to reread the instructions on
the io board. Years ago when I installed
a eide board on an older system so that
it could handle the 10 gig drive I peruchased,
I was instructed to set the ide settings in
the bios to I think it was 45 or 47. This may
not be the same with what you have, but it
may be something like that. For instance, you
may need to disable the onboard ide in order
for the sata card to take over. I am assuming
sata is scsi ata right? I don't keep up on
drive technology to much.

I suggest you look for something like that, since
the issue is that the system does not detect
the drives. There must be a setting within the
bios  whether it be the board or the card
that is interfering with this.

It could also be a resource conflict. An irq
that needs to be changed. Look at the irq as
well as the (int15) I tink that's what it is.
See if their are any jumpers on the board or
if there is anything in the board bios that
may be causing this.

Check the hardware support for redhat linux.
to Be srue that the board is supported. Have
you tried the 6.0 release to see if this is
an issue with it? Try the 5.6 version as well.

That's all the idea's I have. Sorry if they
don't help:

Scott
Scott A Tovey

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #8 on: August 09, 2004, 05:19:03 AM »
satovey,

This is not a BIOS issue.  Windows XP installs just fine, with the Xp SATA RAID drivers provided on diskette.

cublink

Problems with SATA Raid and SME
« Reply #9 on: August 09, 2004, 11:13:45 AM »
I have similar problem with an ASUS m/b and promis controller. What I found was that the driver for my controller is compiled against RH9.0 and even though booting with accept dd the driver is not installed, it is neccecary to compile the driver against the sme kernel and then either make a floppy driver of it or modify the boot iso to include the driver. I searched the forum for RAID and found an article on how to recompile the boot iso and installing (albeit a scsi raid) into the kernel drivers, should be the same for your setup.

Hope this helps

Andy

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #10 on: August 09, 2004, 04:19:55 PM »
cublink,

Could you post the link to that article you found?  Thank you.

anyone,

Our understanding is that SME 6.0.1 is based on Redhat 7.2, for which we have a Linux RAID Driver.  Can anyone confirm or refute the version of linux that SME 6.0.1 is based upon?

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #11 on: August 09, 2004, 05:33:31 PM »
We ran through the "left shift at boot" routine with the driver disk again.  We failed to mention before that after being prompted for the driver disk, it does say "Loading viasraid driver ..."

It actually does that twice before going to the "You probably want to manually select a driver" screen.

Also, we noticed during boot-up that the SME install says, "Unknown VIA Southbridge ... disabling DMA ..."

On a related note, we read somewhere that the version of linux kernel used for installation may (or may not) be the same version that exists on the drive after installation.  Therefore, a two kernel versions of the same RAID driver are needed:  One during install, and another for after.

Does anyone know what kernel version is used during SME install, and also what kernel version exists after?

cublink

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #12 on: August 09, 2004, 06:58:59 PM »
Howto add a scsi raid controller driver (note 4.x sme but priciple the same)
http://www.e-smith.org/docs/howto/contrib/e-smith_adaptec_raid.htm
Creating driver boot disk for 6.0
http://www.comnetel.com/bootdisk.htm
Changing and making a boot iso to keep the new drivers
http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/dmay/smeserver/howto/smeserver-iso-howto.html

cublink

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #13 on: August 09, 2004, 07:05:39 PM »
Also see
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=23433.0
Note comment from Rheingold about staying away from SATA and subsequent comments about DMA problems

jeremy

Trying to install SME 6.0.1 on SATA RAID ... BUG in SME ...
« Reply #14 on: August 11, 2004, 03:37:29 AM »
The link two posts up about "Howto add a scsi raid controller driver" says to download the "devtools" from http://www.Contribs.org/contribs/saco/contrib/devtools_SME6.0/

However, when following that link one finds that 9 of the 24 files have "devel" in their name.

Any idea which  file they are referring to specifically?  None seems to stand out, while some (like the apache devel file) don't seem appopriate for this task.