Topic: SATA/GRUB install problem

[stdean]

I'm having a hard time installing SME 7.2 onto my server.

I have a SuperMicro board with an SATA  controller on it.

Previously this machine was in production but was recently retired. When it was in use it was using 2 Hitachi SATA drives. They were 250GB each. The machine was also running SME 7.1. I had them installed with the 'noraid' option.

I've upgraded the drives and added 2 Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB drives.

I've managed to install the OS but when it reboots I get nothing. The BIOS will come up, it sees the 2 disks but once it comes to booting nothing happens.

It will display 'GRUB' and hang at this point. Sometimes it will display 'GRUB GRUB HARD DISK ERROR'.

I've tried to install 7.1 as well as Centos 4.4 and I'm seeing the same errors here.

In the BIOS in the SATA settings I have 3 options, I can set it to IDE, MIMO, RAID but I've got it set to MIMO at the moment (this is what it was set to for the oldser HITACHI disks).

I've read that there are some issues with SME and SATA drives and it advised that you set the jumpers to 1.5Gps and another place it mentioned setting 'sme acpi=off' at the install time. I've tried both of these but to no avail.

Has anyone had a similar experience with SATA drives like this. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with either the BIOS settings or the drives themselves. A problem with the drives seems strange to me though, I cant undersand why one set of SATA drives would work, but another set dont.

Anyway, if anyone has seen this before, or has had this problem I'd appreciate any pointers or ideas on this.

Cheers,

Conor

[edb]

I have seen that symtom before ...

Fix for ASUS M2N-MX Motherboard

Here's what I had to do ...

1) Enter BIOS utility and go to Advanced Options-Southbridge-Change Video memory to 16MB

2) Press Esc to enter boot options and edit the kernel string by appending "acpi=off" to the end of the line.

Worked for me ... 

[stdean]

Cheers for the advise, but I don't seem to have any video settings in my BIOS.

Going into the Advanced Settings -> Northbridge I have the following options/settings

Hide XIOAPIC PCI Functions [Yes]
Power Button Instant Off [Enabled]
Hyper Transport Config
N0:HT1000 HT Link Speed [Auto]
N0:HT1000 HT Link Width [Auto]

Any ideas?

Conor

[edb]

Do you have an onboard video card?
It is usually a problem with the video setting and the acpi ...

You could also try the CENTOS mail list as they are pretty helpfull with hardware stuff ...

[stdean]

looking at the board, I can see an ATI Rage onboard card.

Do you think disabling ACPI in the BIOS can help?

Conor

[edb]

Give it a try .... but if I remember right it was the memory setting that really did it for me but I did have the advanced power management stuff disabled in the bios as well ... don't know why but some things just don't make sense.
You'll know the result in about 20 minutes with SME.

To my knowledge ACPI is not compatible with CENTOS yet ....

[stdean]

Ok, I'm still getting nowhere with this.

I've turned off all ACPI settings in the BIOS and when doing the install I'm doing it as 'sme acpi=off'.

It installs fine (it even sees the previous install attempts) but again when it reboots after the install I'm getting the same 'GRUB GRUB Hard Disk Error'.

I have no idea what needs to be done next.

I've had a look over on the Centos boards and I'm not seeing much in the line of similar problems.

Conor

[stdean]

Ok, after approx 24 hours of trying to figure this out I think I might have made some progress.

I managed to boot into rescue mode and could see that the OS had been written to disk. A little searching on the internets seems to say that it's my BIOS at fault.

I've found the updated BIOS for my board and I'm ready to install it BUT I do not have a floppy drive on this machine. I have ton of USB keys but n floppy drive.

My question is, does anyone know of an easy/reliable way to create a bootable USB  key, without having to resort to windows?

Conor

[edb]

If it's a BIOS update you need then I would either buy or borrow one specifically for the purpose of flashing the BIOS otherwise you may not be able to do the necessary flash update which replys on you having a floopy drive installed.

Just my 2 cents