[Malvern] Help!!

[Steve Cashmore]

Actually I've now succeeded after a bit of a struggle.

Trouble was a bug in the 'dmraid' disk driver.  Although I'm not using 
the raid feature, FC6 hardware detect found the raid controller and 
loaded the module.  Invoking the install with the 'nodmraid' option got 
me past that lockup but installed a broken system.  The drive I'm 
installing on *is* using the raid controller but in a non-raid 
configuration.  The 'dmraid' driver doesn't seem to like that.  The 
machine has 3 drives, 1 with DOS, XP and QNX partitions, the second with 
a large shared linux swap & XP swap together with FC4, and the third is 
removable and contains Amanda backups.

I'm installing FC6 over the existing FC4 installation after a partition 
resize & reformat using the excellent GParted live CD.

I made a grub floppy with a custom kernel line and managed to get the 
system booted but then it locked up during the first-time video detect 
in an endless video changing loop.  It's a pretty ordinary Radeon 8500 
AGP card.  I crashed out and booted a rescue cd, mounted the new system 
and cleared the first-time boot flag.  After correcting the installed 
grub kernel line the system now booted and I configured 'X' manually. 
Yum got me 330Mb of updates (this is a minimum X install!) and I am now 
up and running.  Now I just need to install some compiler packages and 
I'm away.
Instead of the rescue CD I could probably have just added the 'single' 
option to the kernel command in grub, but I wasn't sure if the 
first-time boot stuff would trip me up again.

Thanks for the advice.
-- 
Steve

Richard Forster wrote:
> I saw this on some servers at work recently. It was actually FC5 that 
> was being installed but the system stopped just like yours after the 
> keyboard selection.
> 
> I put it down to a faulty hard drive which dell swapped with a friendly 
> service and no quibble (once I threatened the Indian I would send a 
> letter to the office of Michael Dell if they hung up on me again)
> 
> I had been using dd to copy the image from the first server, once 
> installed, onto each hard drive from the other servers plus 2 spares 
> that were bought. One of the spares failed to dd properly, stopping 
> after 64GB instead of 80GB. So I tried a normal install which just froze 
> after the keyboard selection. Hence the faulty hard drive verdict.
> 
> Am I right in reading that you have a one hard drive that you are trying 
> to install onto and a second hard drive with FC4 on? Can you try a third 
>  hard drive?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Steve Cashmore wrote:
>> Seasons greetings everyone!
>>
>> Please, I need some help installing Fedora Core 6 on an almost bog 
>> standard desktop machine.  Please don't tell me to use a different 
>> distro, I have reasons for using FC6!
>>
>> Basically the DVD installation stalls immediately after the 2nd screen 
>> which is selecting the keyboard type.  The screen clears the window in 
>> preparation for the next step and - nothing.
>>
>> 1  The motherboard is an Intel 845E with on-board Promise ATA raid 
>> controller.
>>
>> 2  The machine is multiple boot with an existing fully working FC4 
>> installation in a partition on a 2nd disk on the Promise controller.
>>
>> 3  I can see no obvious errors on tty3 & 4.  There *is* an 'audit' 
>> message on tty4 which looks like a SELINUX log.  But as far as I can 
>> tell SELINUX isn't activated at this point.
>>
>> 4  After locking up I still have a usable command line on tty2, and 
>> can see and mount the existing linux installation.  So there isn't a 
>> missing Promise driver issue.
>>
>> 5  One of the two anaconda / python installation processes is stuck at 
>> 100% cpu.
>>
>> 6  I have tried text and graphic mode install options with exactly the 
>> same error at the same point.
>>
>> 7  I have tried options like noprobe, acpi=off, and reducing memory 
>> with mem=840M to no avail.  Locks up at the same point.
>>
>> 8  Even the rescue mode fails in the device.py script with a "size 
>> must be positive" message on enumerating the disk partitions.
>>
>> 9  The DVD (loaned from Geoff) validates OK.
>>
>> So linux gurus please help me out, I can't yet think of a way around 
>> the probs.
>>
>>
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>>
> 
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