Topic: v5.6 fresh install failure...

[Andre Courchesne]

Hi,

  Ok, first the setup:

      Intel D845GBV motherboard
      Intel 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor
      512Mb RAM
      3COM nic
      Intel nic
      Primary master: Maxtor 20G drive
      Primary slave: Maxtor 20G drive
      Secondary master: LG 52x CD-rom

  Now the problem:

      When starting the installation everything seems fine, but when looking at the installation details screen (alt-F3), I see the following messages:

  Your root partition is less than 250 Megabytes which is usially too small to install Mitel Network SME Server.

  Than 2 other similar messages about the doot and swap partitions.

  Now I wipped both drives before the install. When I say wipe it's not just fdisk to remove partition, I mean I zeroed-out the drives.

  The installation is supposed to take care of the partitionning no???

  If I let go, the install of the packages will take forever (more than 10 hours) and will eventually fail with messaged like can't mount /, can't mount /boot,...

  I'll try 5.5 on the same machine, but I remember doing it and did not see anything wrong...

  Any ideas are welcome!

----
Andre Courchesne
http://www.net-forces.com

[nick]

>       Primary master: Maxtor 20G drive
>       Primary slave: Maxtor 20G drive
>       Secondary master: LG 52x CD-rom

I had a similar problem installing SME 5.5, the installation process never seem to end.  Cut a long story short, it turned out that my CD ROM drive did not work with the maxtor 60 gig drives, I replaced the CD ROM and the installation worked without further issue, using the same drives.

For the full story, please see this link - http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=5938.msg21131#msg21131

Hope this helps
Nick

[Andre Courchesne]

Thanks for the feed-back nick.

Unfortunatly I don't think this is the case on mine. I just completed 5.5 install in no more than 8 minutes...

Same setup, I on;y popped-out the 5.6 CD and replaced it with the 5.5 CD... Even the media is of the same brand...

[Andre Courchesne]

After a sucessfull 5.5 installation on the exact same hardware I tried to upgrade to 5.6 and it got stuck at the "Finding package to upgrade" section...

[Arkman]

Have you tried re-burning the CD, or even better just checking the md5sum to see that you have a good iso?

[Andre Courchesne]

Initially I had burned the ISO to a ReWritable media. I then did a copy to a standard CD-W with the same result. However I did a copy from the CD-RW to the CD-W, soyes they are identical, but are they as they should...

I'll check the md5sum tonight on the CD, but the iso image I used has a good md5sum... fb2a795686e272eace3cd60875c9fa39

[Ale]

Is it a raid installation?
if it is, it would be beter  having both hdd as primary master and secondary master, and the cd rom, as secondary slave (or primary slave) I read this sometime ago in this forums, and seems to be cause of that kind of troubles.

[Andre Courchesne]

Interesting...

  I'll give that a shot. And yes it is a raid install.

[Charlie Brady]

Andre Courchesne wrote:

>   If I let go, the install of the packages will take forever
> (more than 10 hours) ...

I think you'll find the same thing if you install RedHat 7.3, but RH 8.0 will be OK. I've seen the same extremely slow install problem on one new system. Changing the DMA settings in the BIOS for the hard drive(s) from AUTO to UDMA2 fixed the problem.  That' s worth a try.

Charlie

[Andre Courchesne]

Ok, some results:

  1.-UDMA2 settings on all drives:
            Same problem, very slow.
 
  2.-Removed primary slave hard disk drive, raid install:
            Same problem, very slow.

  3.-Removed primary slave hard disk drive, single drive install:
            BIOS spits out error about CD-ROM not being ATAPI and request to press F4... Probably because of the empty spot on primary slave...
            Only 2 warning on ATL-F3 screen:
                          root partition too small (<250Mb)
                          swap space allocated is less (256Mb ) than memory (512Mb)
            Installation (format, RPM) speed is normal (ETA in the 5-7 minutes range)
            Installation completed all right.
            Reboot and post install config went ok.

  Note that test 2 and 3 were done with BIOS set to UDMA2 for all IDE drives.

  Now, if I installed on 1 drive, if I populate my second drive, how do I activate raid?

[Ed Form]

Andre Courchesne wrote:
>
> Ok, some results:
>
>   1.-UDMA2 settings on all drives:
>             Same problem, very slow.
>  
>   2.-Removed primary slave hard disk drive, raid install:
>             Same problem, very slow.
>
>   3.-Removed primary slave hard disk drive, single drive
> install:
>             BIOS spits out error about CD-ROM not being ATAPI
> and request to press F4... Probably because of the empty spot
> on primary slave...
>             Only 2 warning on ATL-F3 screen:
>                           root partition too small (<250Mb)
>                           swap space allocated is less (256Mb
> ) than memory (512Mb)
>             Installation (format, RPM) speed is normal (ETA
> in the 5-7 minutes range)
>             Installation completed all right.
>             Reboot and post install config went ok.
>
>   Note that test 2 and 3 were done with BIOS set to UDMA2 for
> all IDE drives.
>
>   Now, if I installed on 1 drive, if I populate my second
> drive, how do I activate raid?

This is a bug in 5.6. A number of people have experienced it. There was a suggestion a week or two back that the cause was problems with Seagate Barracudas but that isn't the case. 5.6 has a problem installing on some software RAID mirrors. I reported this to bugs@... and was told that they couldn't reproduce it, and because of the correspondence about Barracuda troubles I accepted their conclusion. But I can reproduce the problem with Maxtors and you've found the same.

Ed Form

[Gorm]

I gat exatly the same problem with 2 segate  40 gigabyte hardisks - configured as ide 1 primary hardisk
ide 1 CD slave
ide 2 primary hardisk

The instalation stops after a few aeca. at line:

'ESR value before enable vector 0000002'

and nothing happens after that. I have ealier had 5.6 on this machine with no problems - is there a bugfix for this ??
Gorm

[Gorm]

Sorry - it was 5.5 i had on the machine before

[Gorm]

Sorry - it was 5.5 i had on the machine before