Problem installing Redhat 7.2 on proliant ML150

[Bratières]

Hi,

Due to historical reasons (other servers with same OS) , we have to install RedHat linux 7.2 on a new HP proliant ML150 server with an adaptec 2120S raid card (which is RH 7.2 supported) supplied by HP.
We formatted the 3 x 36GB drives to a 72 GB raid 5 array.
We could not find the RH 7.2 drivers for this card on HP site so we downloaded it from adaptec and created the floppy with it.
We also have an update anaconda floppy.
Running rh install (linux dd noprobe updates)
we put the driver floppy when asked to and the
install crashes with signal 11.

Thanks for help

J.Bratières

[Steven E. Protter]

A few broad suggestions:

1) Make sure there is no scsi conflict. No other devices or cards that think they have the same id.

2) If there is a disk preparation CD that comes with the server, boot off it, prepare the disk using the GUI and then try the installation.

SEP

[Bratières]

Thanks to Steven E Protter

The HP CD just contains disgnostics (which run OK including the disk array) and drivers for RH entreprise server 3 and 4.

Just to see , I removed the Raid controller and installed an IDE disk and install began OK (so it is not a mother board problem).

Still looking for ideas..

J.Bratières

[Stuart Browne]

try running the text-based installer instead, see if it gets any further:

boot: text dd noprobe

[Bratières]

Thanks also,

The text installation does exactly the same.
Also tried just "boot: text noprobe updates" to use
the modified anaconda , no signal , but installation does not find any drive to fdisk.
"boot: text dd updates noprobe" ends with signal 11 justa after reading driver floppy.

J.Bratières

[Bratières]

Things have gone on...
In fact there were two problems:
.the driver floppy was bad
.the noprobe command when booting installation CD must not be issued (found in adaptec knowledge base)

SO: ... we successfully installed RH 7.2 BUT , alas,
when booting we had the following:

spurious error 8259A interrup IRQ 7
AAC0 ... several messages (version ...)
scsi0 aacraid
Partition check
sda : sda1 sda2
Mounting /proc
Creatins root device
Mounting root file system
Mount: error 19 Mounting ext2
pivot root:pivot-root (...) failed : 2
kernel panic: No init found

Thanks for any idea (we are thinking of downgrading the raid controller firmware ?)

J.Bratières

[Gopi Sekar]

I believe installed kernel could not find driver for your adpatec controller thus not able to mount it. you have to inject the downloaded adaptec driver in to the installed kernel's initrd, for this boot with any new distribution which has support for this card (you can try with Fedora core) and get into linux rescue mode.

From there mount the installed system /boot partition, uncompress the initrd, copy the adaptec driver, make necessary referrences in linuxrc file, unmount the initrd, gzip it back as initrd.img and put it in to /boot directory. This should bring up your installed system.

Regards,
Gopi

[Bratières]

Thanks for your answers.
The problem is solved using grub instead of lilo.

Thanks again for the time spent investigating.

J.Bratières