[Server-devel] Problems installing XS on new system for Uruguay

[Tony Pearson]

Greg, 
The XS hardware is up and running, and now am encountering some software 
issues that I may need help from the server-devel list to resolve.  

Hardware: 
V3-M2A690G barebones PC with M2A-VM motherboard, power supply and tower 
case, 
The M2A-VM motherboard has ATI SB600 RAID controller, ATI Radeon 1200 
Graphics, 8 USB ports, built-in NIC. 
AMD Athlon64 X2 dual-core 2.3 Ghz processor with heatsink/fan 
Two extra NIC cards (PCI) 10/100 with RJ-45 ports
One DVD-RW drive, attached on primary IDE-Master 
Two SATA drives, 160GB each, connected on SATA1 and SATA2.  
One 2GB DIMM. 

I had it almost all together yesterday in four hours, but had to go back 
to the store to get an extra SATA power cable adapter and return an extra 
SATA signal cable. I took photos, so I might be able to document the 
process for future hardware builds.

The XS-163.iso would freeze because there was no "Partition Table" on the 
disks.  I was able to fully install "64-bit Fedora Core 8-AMD64" on the 
system, which was enough to put partition table on /dev/sda and format an 
ext3 file system.  After that, I was able to fully install "32-bit Ubuntu 
8.04" on the system.  Both run in full graphics mode, and I was able to 
test all the memory, verify ethernet connectivity, etc. 

Problem 1:  I boot from XS-163.iso and select "Run from Image" (the first 
choice) and it claims that "ATI Radeon 1200" is not supported, and that it 
will go into text-only mode for the install.  I figure this is not really 
a problem, since this is a text-only server eventually.  I suspect there 
are Radeon 1200 drivers on later versions of Linux, so it might be 
something I can fix after the fact. 

Problem 2: I log in as "root" and run the "./olpc-install" and it fails on 
line 23 saying "Specified nonexistent disk sda in clearpart command" with 
a big red button to "reboot". (see attached JPG file:  img_4751b.jpg for 
screen shot) 

Rebooting without the XS-ISO cd results in running the current "32-bit 
Ubuntu 8.04" that I had installed previously, so it looks like it didn't 
wipe out anything.  I tried this with both "XS-163" and "XS-150" (from 
back in February) and got similar failure messages.   My next try will be 
the "XS-160-noauto" ISO file.   I could also try to do the "kickstart" 
manually?  Would that work?  If I do that, would I be better off doing 
Fedora7-AMD64 instead or stay with the 32-bit version? 

Problem 3: the BIOS supports three settings:  IDE, RAID and AHCI.  With 
RAID, I can hit Ctrl-F to get to the FastBuild utility, and put the two 
drives into a single RAID-1 configuration, however, it does not seem that 
Linux recognizes that.  With the two drives as one Logical RAID-1 drive, 
the Linux treats this as separate /dev/sda and /dev/sdb drives.

I found this link, indicating that the ATI SB600 "fakeraid" support 
through the "dmraid" device mapper is supported in AHCI mode, but if I say 
AHCI on the BIOS setting, it treats the two drives separately.
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#ahci

I could instead go for a software-based Linux LVM mirroring.  In that 
case, I might use the BIOS=AHCI setting, and then set up the LVM, but that 
is different than the LVM setup in that base XS kickstart file.

Please advise. 




Tony Pearson
Senior Storage Consultant, IBM System Storage?
Telephone: +1 520-799-4309 |  tie 321-4309 |  Cell: +1 520 990-8669
email: tpearson at us.ibm.com |  GSA: http://tucgsa.ibm.com/~tpearson
Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/InsideSystemStorage
AKA: 990tony Paravane, eightbar specialist 


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