Install = OK, Boot = OK login root = loops forever (Mandrakre Linux)

[CA926020]

Hi all,

Hoping someone can help me with this one as it is totally bizarre.

Ok here the deal. I???ve been trying to install Linux on a HP Netserver LH Pro with 6 18gig Seagate drive, Pentium Pro with 2 200mhz processors, 512MB and an HP NetRaid 1 RAID card and a Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM video card.

I created a Raid Array with the following configuration:

7 logical drives, Raid 5. First drive is 7gig, remaining 6 drives are roughly 11gig each

I tried Red Hat and no go it gets partway through the install and just dies. At work we have a Netserver Lx Pro (quad Pentium Pro) and we were unable to install Red Hat, but it took Mandrake. So to make a longer story shorter I downloaded the ISO???s for Mandrake 9.1 to see if it would work, (I did all the checksum verification on the ISO???s and it came up ok), created the CD???s and started the installation.

The system started the installation, located devices, including the Raid card which it identified as a MegaRaid card. This is correct according to everything I???ve been reading on the forums. Went all the way through the installation, (I installed a lot of packages), configured the video, etc with no issues. Following the instructions I removed the CD from the drive and clicked on re-boot. The system went through the load process just fine, came up and asked me what I wanted to boot, ie Linux-secure, Linux-SMP etc. I selected Linux-SMP, system took me to a login prompt I logged in as root and a box popped up telling me it was completing the configuration. The box remained on the screen for a few minutes and then went away with a clock and a red background screen, (mouse still worked). All six of the drives were showing heavy activity, they were just being hammered. This continued for three hours with no sign of completing the login process and I finally shut the system off for fear that it was going to overheat the drives.

Has anybody ever seen this before or have any suggestions? At this point the only idea I have is to wipe the install and start over as I can???t even get logged in to trouble shoot the issue. Also, I took all the defaults in the installation including letting it configure the partitions, (except adding packages)as this was just an initial test load.

Any help, ideas etc would be greatly appreciated as I am at a total loss.

Regards,

Gordon Owens

[BR78277]

Have you tried booting the machine in e.g. runlevel 3, so that X does not run and consequently the 'configuration completion' routine does not? Simply supply the argument "3" to the booting kernel - if, as I suspect, you have grub, press "e" at the boot menu to edit the line with "kernel" on it. You could also try booting normally, logging in an X session as root, and then hitting ctrl-alt-F1 while the configuration routine is running, so that you switch to a text-based virtual console, where you can log in as root and kill the runaway process.