As several people suggested, the weird CentOS install problem I described last week was solved by using a separate small /boot partition. I used a 100MB partition.
On the other hand, I do not understand why this made a difference. I originally had a root partition that started on cylinder 1, as shown by the fdisk program. I now have a /boot partition that starts on cylinder 1. The only difference is the ending cylinder number. I don't recall what it was originally but it was clearly greater than 1024. Now it's 13. I had no idea that the ending cylinder number made any difference as long as the files in /boot were all located in cylinder numbers <= 1024. Of course, cylinder numbers and other disk geometry measurements are completely virtual in a hardware RAID since the controller translates from the ideal disk the OS sees to the physical locations on the real disks. The thought crossed my mind that maybe the files in /boot, particularly vmlinuz, just happened to end up on cylinders > 1024. If so, that might be an explanation for what happened. Be that as it may, I consider this a bug in the 3ware BIOS. Every modern motherboard BIOS I've seen in the last 5 years, at least, has no problem booting from gigantic root partitions. Why should the 3ware BIOS be any different? I've opened a case with them to try to get to the bottom of this. I appreciate all the comments I received about this problem. I hope that other people who have this problem find this discussion via Google so that they can save themselves some time. Cordially, -- Jon Forrest Research Computing Support College of Chemistry 173 Tan Hall University of California Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-1460 510-643-1032 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
