if doscsi hangs on you, like it does me (now with MadWifi)

[Dr_Stein]

http://www.pbp.net/~jnichols/gentoo/


Is there some master that we should rsync it against?

[Jiffy]

http://www.pbp.net/~jnichols/gentoo/


Is there some master that we should rsync it against?

Thank you very much!

Sorry, I don't have rsync setup. I don't have control over the server, but, www.novickzone.com is the master.

[sferics]

I came across a Dell Poweredge 2300 with a Megaraid Express 200 RAID board (referred to as a PERC 2/SC in Dell's recommendation). It's probably a pretty common config for the Poweredge, anyway. Just chiming in to say that Jiffy's boot-up CD worked great with the boot option doaic7xxx.

On the related topic of firmware updates for these venerable machines, here are some of my findings:

Finding the proper firmware updates for the PWE 2300 took a bit of searching on the Dell site. Most of the links I found on Google were stale. Here is a current link: http://support.dell.com/support/downloa ... OSA&osl=EN#

Be aware, however that the PERC 2/SC firmware on the DELL site is not the latest, and it causes the linux driver to issue a warning against possible data corruption. To get the latest, go to the LSI site below, and on the "Select a specific product" menu, select "Megaraid Express 200". If your RAID board is not a PERC 2/SC, then I'm afraid you are on your own to find the right correspondance.

http://www.lsilogic.com/downloads/selectDownload.do

Sferics

Disclaimer: This worked for me, but it is up to you to make sure that this information is correct for your hardware. I am not responsible for your actions.

[cayenne]

Hello everyone.

I've tried downloading the custom iso from the main site...and the mirror.

When I try to burn them using CD Bake oven application...they blow up. Is there something wrong with the iso images? I can burn other iso's (just did a Knoppix disc) just fine.

Thanks,

cayenne

EDIT: I'm not sure what the deal was. But, I took the file I downloaded to another box...used K3B on it to burn a CD from the iso image...and it worked just fine.

I'm up and installing on a Poweredge 4300....raid5.

[theEnglishman]

Thanks for the modified build. I burnt it with Nero 6 on an XP PC onto CD RW. It worked here on a Dell 2300 with a PERC RAID controller:-

gentoo doaic7xxx domegaraid

Couldn't find a torrent file, but if there is one, count me in.

If anyone's in London I'll buy them a beer!!

Neil

[don_thomaso]

If I had only found this thread a week ago. I was installing gentoo on a HP Netserver LC2000 and it was real pain. The driver found the card but I couldn't get any /dev/sdX entries.

I ended up booting the box with a Debian boot disc (it uses a 2.4 kernel), it found my LSI card and installed just fine. When the install was done I installed Gentoo from Debian and compiled a new kernel 2.6.12.3, with the legacy megaraid drivers, now it works like a charm.

I've grabbed the install-x86-minimal-2004.3-scsi-r4a now and it boots fine. I've modprobed sym8c53xx and megraid and it found my all the discs.

I'm going to install Gentoo on a Dell Poweredge 6400 this week too, I'll report how the install-x86-minimal-2004.3-scsi-r4a works on that machine.

Great job on the custom boot cd!

[Jiffy]

Hi, sferics, cayenne, theEnglishman and don_thomaso, thanks for the updates.
Glad to hear the CD is helping!

I wish I were in London, I could use a beer

[jmeile]

Hi,

First I tried with the normal gentoo universal disk 2005.1, but it didn't show any of my
scsi disks in the /dev (there weren't sd*). I even tried to load the respective modules,
megaraid and sym53c8xx, with modprobe, but nothing happens. Then, I did a research
with google and found a message where somebody, also having a HP NetServer, pointed
to this thread and said that just

Code: Select all

gentoo domegaraid

should work. I tried that, but as soon as the gentoo image is decompressed, my keyboard
doesn't responds to the keystrokes anymore. I tried other options like:

Code: Select all

gentoo
gentoo domegaraid nokeymap
gentoo domegaraid nokeymap noapic
gentoo domegaraid nokeymap noapic ide=nodma
gentoo domegaraid dosym53c8xx

But all of them disabled my keyboard. At the end, I could see the the prompt (#), but it didn't
let me to type anything.

Does anybody knows how to solve this problem?

More info about the system:

HP NetServer LP 2000r with NetRaid 4M and Symbios Logic 53C1010, which corresponds to
module sym53c8xx (According to the HP HowTo from Bruno Corec)

Regards,
Josef

[jmeile]

Ok, I solved the problem. It turned to be a really really ***stupid*** an ***unimaginable*** detail. Unfortunately, I just figured out it
after I gave up installing gentoo and installed debian. In debian, everything worked, I could install the base system, but when I booted, the keyboard
didn't work as well. I was using an sgi keyboard, so, I decided to try another one and it worked without problems. I even boot with the gentoo image
posted here, without any parameter, and my keyboard not only worked, but I could see my scsi hardisk. I'm really sad because I think after installing
debian, I won't try gentoo in this machine. However, I will keep gentoo on my desktop

I don't know what the hell have the sgi keyboards. They look like other keyboards, but only the color is different

Regards,
Josef

[Wolfpack98]

After having fought with a Dell PowerEdge 4200 for the last 2 weeks, this setup DEFINITELY Worked! Kudos to those that worked on it!

Now to get my frakkin' kernel built

[jmeile]

Hi,

after trying to install first gentoo, then debian, and finally Red Hat Enterprice Advanced Server,
I came back to gentoo. I was having a kernel Panic at first:

VFS: Cannot open root device "sda3" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

I even posted a message, but anything there had solved my problem:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-377568.html

So, I posted here since I've seen there is people having similar problems.

The kernel panic didn't come anymore. Instead of that, the system hangs while booting:

Booting 'Gentoo Linux x86-2.6.12-r10'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r10 root=/dev/sda3
[Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1c00, size=0x19d9b7]

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.

So, I guess there is somewhere a conflicting module. My SCSI hardware is a
Symbios Logic 53C1010, which corresponds to the driver "sym53c8xx" and it
has NetRaid-1 support, but I am not planing to use mirroring.

According to the minmal-CD from this thread, the modules I need to load are:
megaraid, sym53c8xx, and scsi_transport_spi

So, here is my SCSI config:

#
# SCSI device support
#
CONFIG_SCSI=y
CONFIG_SCSI_PROC_FS=y

#
# SCSI support type (disk, tape, CD-ROM)
#
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD=y
# CONFIG_CHR_DEV_ST is not set
# CONFIG_CHR_DEV_OSST is not set
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR_VENDOR=y
CONFIG_CHR_DEV_SG=y

#
# SCSI Transport Attributes
#
CONFIG_SCSI_SPI_ATTRS=y
CONFIG_SCSI_FC_ATTRS=y
CONFIG_SCSI_ISCSI_ATTRS=y

#
# SCSI low-level drivers
#
CONFIG_MEGARAID_NEWGEN=y
CONFIG_MEGARAID_MM=y
CONFIG_MEGARAID_MAILBOX=y
CONFIG_MEGARAID_LEGACY=y
CONFIG_SCSI_SATA=y
CONFIG_SCSI_EATA_TAGGED_QUEUE=y
CONFIG_SCSI_EATA_LINKED_COMMANDS=y
CONFIG_SCSI_EATA_MAX_TAGS=16
CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_2=y
CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_2=y
CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_DMA_ADDRESSING_MODE=1
CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_DEFAULT_TAGS=16
CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_MAX_TAGS=64
# CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_IOMAPPED is not set

#
# Multi-device support (RAID and LVM)
#
CONFIG_MD=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_MD=y
CONFIG_MD_LINEAR=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID0=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID1=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID10=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID5=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID6=y
CONFIG_MD_MULTIPATH=y
CONFIG_MD_FAULTY=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM=y
CONFIG_DM_CRYPT=y
CONFIG_DM_SNAPSHOT=y
CONFIG_DM_MIRROR=y
CONFIG_DM_ZERO=y
CONFIG_DM_MULTIPATH=y
CONFIG_DM_MULTIPATH_EMC=y
# CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM_BBR is not set

Which Modules should I activate/deactivate?

I event tried with the config file of the minimal CD, the one stored at:
/etc/kernels, but it didn't work. I guess it is because everything is set
as modules. So, how did you get the CD working on the megaraid
hardware?

Regards,
Josef Meile

[Jiffy]

Josef,
Did you actually get through the install and you are having trouble building a kernel or are you still having problems with the boot CD?

Jiffy

[jmeile]

Hi Jeffy,

the CD succeeded when booting the machine and showed me my megaraid hardisks. My
problem were when booting from a new compiled kernel. Anyway, nevermind. I found
an old config file from my previous linux "suse 7.6" for a 2.4 kernel. I used it with a
2.6 kernel and somethings I can remmember is having set the following drivers like
this:

SCSI generic Support [m] -> It was [y] before
LSI New Generation Raid Device Drivers -> Not set
LSI Logic Legacy MegaRaid Driver [y]

Before I could see the menu config, I was prompted to choose either add or discard
new features from the 2.6 kernel. I didn't include most of them.

Regards,
Josef

[bus.dch]

Hi, I have an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ processor and an Asus A8N-VM/CSM motherboard (with the nForce 430 chipset) and the minimal AMD64 cd image was giving me problems (install-amd64-minimal-2005.1-r1.iso)

It would hang while loading the sata_sx4 module (not the PCI coldplug), but after noload=sata_sx4, I figured out it was hanging after doing something with sata_nv. Hard to see what, since it cleared the console line and overwrote it with sata_sx4. If I disabled sata_sx4, it would hang on sata_uli, the next sata module it was trying. If I booted "gentoo nosata," it would still hang because in the PCI coldplug it would modprobe sata_nv. (I guess it detected it.)

I tried "gentoo noapic." That doesn't work because (I think?) it's a dual core system, so the APIC is needed to load something right at the beginning (before the framebuffer is initialized?)

Well, to my surprise, install-x86-minimal-2005.1-r1.iso works great, loads all the sata_* modules great, and so I (think) I can use that to get an amd64 install, right?

I was about to download http://www.novickzone.com/gentoo/instal ... si-r4a.iso when the x86 CD image worked. Maybe I'll try it anyway to see what it does, just out of curiosity.

[Jiffy]

bus.dsh,
Sorry for the late reply.
You may already know this and have your reasons for using the x86 build, but, do you realize that by not using the 64 bit build, you are not taking full advantage of your CPU?
Also, with the new 2005.x releases, I'm not so sure my CDs are required anymore. I haven't had a reason to use them, my systems are up and running, but, I plan on downloading, burning and rebooting with the new CDs in the near future to see if they work for disaster recovery. I'll post my findings here.

Jiffy

[bus.dch]

Yeah, so I want to make the jump from x86 to amd64. A little reading has led me to this process, AFAIK:

1. Get the system working in x86, especially the network driver.
2. Build an amd64 kernel.
3. Boot into amd64 kernel, still have an x86 filesystem. (Will this work??)
4. Change the CHOST, etc.
5. rebuild as amd64.

[Jiffy]

1. Get the system working in x86, especially the network driver.
2. Build an amd64 kernel.
3. Boot into amd64 kernel, still have an x86 filesystem. (Will this work??) I really don't know.
4. Change the CHOST, etc.
5. rebuild as amd64.

I've never tried this process, I built my PC amd64 from the 64 bit boot cd.
I'm really curious as to if this actually would work. If you do this, please let me know how it worked out. Good luck!

Jiffy

[bus.dch]

I'm really curious as to if this actually would work. If you do this, please let me know how it worked out. Good luck!

I don't know if I already said, I have a working amd64 install. But shouldn't the amd64 livecd work? (It shouldn't crash on sata_nv.) Plus, yeah, this other question about switching from x86 to amd64... So I'm going to do a reinstall. First, I need to get all my h/w working, so that I have all the drivers figured out. Then I'll reinstall. (Oh, and I'm going to go in to work in there sometime...)