Just thought i'd share my recent experiences with odd hardware problems,
and other assorted messes with setting up a new file server, which is
working now, though i'm not sure if i did this the best way i could have.
the machine:
Celeron 333, Intel SE440-BX2 motherboard, latest bios (p.15 at this
moment), 128 megs of ram, Adaptec 2940AU SCSI card, Millenium II AGP video
4 Seagate Medalist 13.02 gig ultra ATA IDE hard disks
1 Seagate Barracuda 2 gig scsi disk
1 NEC 2x scsi cdrom
1 HP 12/24 gig DDS3 tape drive
The main system case is an InWin full tower, with 2 additional fans
installed. The SCSI devices are in an external enclosure. Drives are in
alternating bays to allow for the most ventilation possible.
The SCSI disk is the boot device, and the 4 IDE drives are configured in a
software RAID0 array. Yeah, I know, IDE isn't the best thing for RAID, and
RAID0 isn't the best RAID, but cost was factor A and volume of storage was
factor B.
Installed RedHat 6.0. Issue number 1: LILO wouldn't install on the SCSI
drive, and it wouldn't let me use is as /... Disk Druid kept telling me
that sda1 wasn't the first drive... even though it was. The Adaptec SCSI
BIOS reported it set to 0x80.
Aborted the install. Disconnected the IDE drives, since I wouldn't need
them until later anyway. Now the install goes fine. Created boot floppy,
since I had a feeling it was going to get messy.
Install went fine. Installed IDE drives, Booted sda1 without issue.
Downloaded the 2.2.11 source and the raid patches. compiled, installed.
LILO had a cow, saying that sda wasn't the first device. grrr... several
floppy boots and tinkers later...
Added a bunch of
disk=/dev/sda
bios=0x80
lines to lilo.conf, one set for each drive. the BIOS knew this, but LILO
didn't like it. Ran LILO, installed boot sector successfully. Reboot, and
we're up.
Next problem. For whatever reason, this machine does NOT like to have both
IDE and SCSI drives. fdisk was seeing some absurd numbers for /dev/hda...
detecting 256 heads, 20K+ sectors, etc... played around with booting from
cd a bit. determined that if there was no SCSI disk, then the IDE drives
were all detected normally, but if any SCSI disk was present (even a zip
drive) it saw hda as a 75gig drive. Which would have been fine if it could
have held 75 gig :)
So after tinkering a bit, I used the expert mode in fdisk to force the
correct number of C/H/S (pulled form the other drives). Success! It let me
create the partition, build /dev/md0, and create an ext2 fs on it.
YAY! Now I'm seeing my 46 gig partition :)
I've copied 250 megs of data to it, unpacked some tarballs, compiled
samba, ssh, netatalk, postgresql and another kernel. disk access working,
read / write going well. looks like we're in business...
Does anyone have any ideas why the system doesn't like the IDE/SCSI mix?
Or is that common? I've never installed both types of disk in one system.
And while I'm at it, anyone know the progress of ext3? I'd REALLY REALLY
like journalling FS on this thing... I was thinking about using Solaris
x86 just for that reason.
Brian
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