Topic: Install on Prosignia 500

[harkon]

I have an old Compaq Prosignia 500 server I'd like to install SME server onto. After setting the Bios to Linux OS type, installation fails with a "You have insufficient memory to install....". I've read that this can be a problem with this box, so I added mem=64Mb to the append line in syslinux.cfg.

Now I get (last 5 lines) ;
"EXT2-fs: unable to mount superblock"
"cramfs: wrong magic"
"FAT: unable to read boot sector"
"isofs_read_super: breead failed, dev=09:00, iso_blknum=16, block=32"
"Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 09:00"

How do I proceed from here? The hard drives are SCSI and are currently FAT32 formatted, I expected to change this later in the installation, had the same problem before the drives were partitioned at all though.

Any ideas?

[tbcomputing]

Your Prosignia has an EISA bus.

To specify the memory your boot prompt has to have:

mem=exactmap mem=640K@0K mem=63M@1M

the last number is your total memory less 1 meg.

Are your hard drives on an array controller - or off the scsi port on the motherboard. I think that the scsi controller is on the PCI bus, but it might be on the EISA bus which will require another boot line parameter.

Post back how you get on with the memory, and look in the configuratiion for the driver for your hard disk controller.

This is definitely doable - I ran SME on a prosignia some time ago.

HTH

Tony

[tbcomputing]

You dont have to change the syslinux file.

As soon as SME starts booting from the CDROM, press control C and when prompted type accept and then the memory parameter specified above.

Tony

[harkon]

System will not boot this CD. Will bootothers, and this CD will boot in other machines, just not together  

System has Symbios 53c8xx SCSI controller on the PCI bus.

Install gets to where I have to specify the CD-ROM type and select the driver. I select the 53c8xx driver, but install goes no further. Seems it can't find the CD-ROM.

Ideas?

Thanks for the help, adjusting the append line in the cfg file gets me at least to this point.

[tbcomputing]

If nobody else jumps in I'll dig my 500 out tomorrow night and give it a go.

Suspect that your CDROM is a standard 2-4x drive which will not see the shiny new CD you burnt on a modern burner.

Have you got a 24x scsi cdrom you could try?

Tony

[harkon]

The CD-ROM is a 4x SCSI unit. It will boot other CD's burnt with the same burner, so I'm not sure that's the problem. Between tasks, I am going to try bootable cd's using floppy emmulation to see if that's the problem. It will for instance boot a BART PE cd I've created, can't run it due to low memory, but it will boot it fine. It will also boot the Ultimate Boot CD, an assortment of tools on a CD. I don't have any other SCSI CD-ROMS to try, but as the hardware works fine to boot other CD's made with the same burner, and it works fine in W2K and W98 I suspect the hardware is fine.

I am currently dowloading SME server 6.0.1 and will try with a fresh CD, you never know eh?

I appreciate your help on this, this box was an NT4 server until the adaptec card the drives were on cratered, thank goodness for backups. I restored data to a new W2K server, and got rid of the Adaptec hardware using the embedded stuff. I have no intention of ever using NT4 Server again, and really don't think W2k is a good fit for this hardware. I would like to use Linux as an alternative, hopefully eventually displacing MS on our servers. This old hardware gives me a chance to get more life out of this box, and convince management that maybe Linux ain't so bad.

Thanks
[/quote]

[harkon]

I've downloaded the latest version (6.0.1) adn the CD also does not boot. I boot to the floppy, and after some fooling around, go the DRVBLOCK.IMG diskette to actually get recognised as an alternative driver disk. I chose the NCR53C8xx driver, and the system is installing as it should.

Hopefully this will be the last of the install problems, now on to setup and configuration.

Thanks to all who helped.

[harkon]

Oh, I forgot to mention, I had to copy the ks-stub.cfg file from the Images dir on the CD to the boot floppy and rename it to ks.cfg. after this the supplemental driver disk worked, before that, the boot process complained it could not find the ks.cfg file, and it would not read the supplemental driver diskette.