OK, this is a fun one. I recently took delivery of a new server, a Dell Poweredge R310
Intel Xeon X3440 quad core, 8GB RAM, etc. Storage is four 500GB drives, hardware RAID1 so shows up as two 500GB drives to the system. H/W controller is SAS1068e, Broadcom NIC, everything else is Intel chips. I want RAID10, so am doing s/w RAID0 during install using both drives. I have a non-raid /boot partition. All f/s are ext3. Squeeze and Lenny both want the non-free NIC drivers on a usb stick, but otherwise both install without reported error. For the purposes of this question, I'm using Squeeze (but Lenny behaves the exact same way, as does the most recent Ubuntu LTS) No matter what combination of LVM, s/w RAID, no s/w RAID, no LVM or whatever I use, GRUB refuses to boot the installed system. Sometimes I get a "GRUB" prompt, but most of the time nothing at all past POST. No error messages are generated during the install process. If I boot a recovery console and try to manually install grub it sometimes works, sometimes fails with an assortment of errors, the googling of which gets me roughly nowhere. Even if grub thinks it's installed, on reboot it fails as above. I've tried pinning grub to 'experimental', I've tried downgrading to grub-legacy, I've added a rootdelay to let the RAID spin up, I've even tried lilo! No joy. I did find a few mentions of older versions of grub having a few bugs which relate to not booting off s/w RAID devices, but those bugs have been fixed a while ago as far as I can tell. But even if that were the problem, installing with no RAID/LVM should work - which it doesn't. The most recent install attempt I've made had an empty /boot directory (despite /vmlinuz.* etc symlinking into there). I had to install a previous kernel version before I got System.map, config, vmlinuz etc in there, and manually running grub-update, grub-install, created right-looking device.map, menu.lst and so on. Now everything *looks* right, it just doesn't *work* Centos installs fine. But I don't know rpm-based distros well enough to do what I need to do down the line, and anyway - this is Debian for goodness sakes! I've installed loads of Debian systems just fine. Any advice, pointers, useful cursewords or anything would be hugely appreciated. Two weeks now I've been going around in circles and I've got a heck of a headache now! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/d8daa0bd-f608-4430-b45f-3840b0b3d...@m7g2000vbn.googlegroups.com
