Koozali.org: home of the SME Server
Obsolete Releases => SME Server 8.x => Topic started by: Proto12 on March 10, 2014, 09:54:08 PM
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Hey everyone,
First of all i want to point out that this is my first post, and as such i want to apologize if the content(s)/questions are misplaced; if they are please let me know and i will move this post elsewhere :-D.
(**EDIT I also want to preface this by saying that i have done a lot of "Googling" and forum-sifting to try to resolve these errors. Although with that said, i would hate to be redundant in posting this thread, so if anyone can link to a longer-standing post regarding these issues please email it to me and i will link to it here or close this topic all together**)
Before describing the issues i've been encountering, here's some information about the hardware i'm using, in case any of the specifics may tip you guys off as to why i may be encountering some of these errors:
Computer/Server: SuperMicro SuperServer 5013C-T (a few years old)
- Pentium P4SCE Motherboard
- Intel E7210 Chipset
- Pheonix AwardBIOS (idk what version, but it is the same format as the BIOS referenced in Chapter 7 of the official manual ~ http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/superserver/1U/MNL-0720.pdf)
Other Specifics:
- While this server has 2 hotswappable hard drive bays that were previously set up to raid each drive, I am trying to install SME onto only 1 hard drive (since the second one went bad mechanically) and therefor with no raid. * I suspect that this may be the crux of my issue as i'll explain below
With that out of the way, my issue is this: After installing SME (smeserver-8.1-i386.iso) from a usb flash drive and disabling raid configuration (via "sme raid=0" at boot) and then rebooting from the hard disk, i either encounter a "GRUB Hard Disk Error", or the GRUB section of the boot phase remains blank. The latter looks something like this...
(txtxtxtxt)
Verifying DMI Pool Data ........................
Grub _
...where the "_" indicates the blinking cursor.
Since I know vaguely that GRUB is part of the bootloader and that i should be able to physically read and if need be rewrite the files, i rebooted the SuperServer from a live usb with Wary Puppy 5.5, mounted the sda1/bay1 hard drive, and found the Grub directory.
From here i opened the device.map file and found that it referenced two hard disks; hd0 being the flashdrive that i installed SME from (which is no longer connected to the system) and hd1 being the bay1 had drive. The file looked something like this...
# This device map was generated by anaconda
(hd1) /dev/sda
(hd0) /dev/sdb
...soooo, thinking that this was indicative of a raid setup i proceeded to modify the file so that hd0 referenced the bay1 hard drive (removing the reference of hd1) and editing the grub.conf accordingly. However, since rebooting gave me the same error i suspect that i somehow miss-edited the files or, as i would assume is more probable, there is more to the GRUB boot process than just using the contents of those two files.
Anyway, that's all sort of unnecessary since i don't know enough about linux to manually configure a boot, but regardless my first question precedes all of that: If there are two hard drive references in the grub.devices file, did Anaconda install SME with a raid1 configuration? If so, shouldn't the parameters "raid=0" have prevented that?
As i mentioned earlier, the SuperServer was originally set up to raid two hard drives, so i then thought that perhaps something in the BIOS/CMOS was forcing any sort of OS installation to enable raid (from here i'm just speculating and throwing ideas out there - i can't say that i really know what i'm talking about that this point :-P). After rebooting again into the BIOS Setup I found nothing that suggested a forced raid setup, however, i did disable parallel ports and messed around with some other Advanced I/O and Bios settings.
Finally, and since nothing that i had done so far has made any changes, i rebooted into Wary Puppy and 'installed,' for a lack of a better term, Grub4Dos into the bootloader of the bay1 hard disk (while 'installing' it identified what i am assuming was the SME partition as "Linux (sda1:PBS)." It is also worthy to note that at this point i had restored the Grub directory to it's original state). Upon reboot i was able to force the server to boot from the linux partition of the hard drive where the boot process stopped at "kernel panic!!! - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! _". After doing a fresh re-install of SME ("sme raid=none" and encountering the same errors as before) and then re-installing Grub4Dos and booting from sda1, GRUB then attempted to find the sda1 partition on the empty floppy disk drive... :-( /facepalm.
With all of that said, i'm sorry for the massive wall of text, and if you're reading this then thank you for drudging through it :P! I hope that some of you may have experienced a similar problem (**EDIT: and then you were able to fix it soon thereafter :D**) or recognize what the issue is since i have exhausted myself trying to troubleshoot it myself. The main reason why i decided to post here is because when searching for solutions (via googling the errors word for word, etc) the posts and fixes themselves almost never applied to CentOS or SME, with the exception of official documentation on the wiki site (which only mentions how to disable raid config during setup).
Anyway, i want to express my thanks ahead of time for any and all input you guys can give me. At this point i feel like the only way to solve this on my own would be to educate myself on linux coding and GRUB syntax/coding, and because of my complete ignorance in that area it has made encountering these errors all the more frustrating and daunting :?.
Thanks again!
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Just a couple of musings..
I would make sure any hardware raid card, setup etc is definetly disabled
When reusing drives it is recommended to make sure the drives have been wiped/zeroed etc just a precaution..dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 count=1
If using 1 HD when installing just go with the defaults, don't do the command line raid=0.
Make sure the USB is removed before the first reboot after setting password and ip's etc
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Hi
I think your problem is TWO RAID mecanism (one on motherbord other in SME). So should start over from zero:
1) zip at least few sector of HDD (use TerryF command)
2) enter in BIOS and disable HW RAID .
You cannot have hardware RAID and software RAID at same time.
3) Install SME as normal and from a CD/DVD (just because it's easier!) , it will use RAID1 in degraded mode and later when you decide to put another HDD it will allow you to sync the HDDs.
Good luck.
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Thanks for the replies!
I think your problem is TWO RAID mechanism (one on motherboard other in SME)...
jader, I think you might be on to something (as i had originally suspected). Unfortunately, I've dug through the BIOS setup menu and found nothing that is indicative of a raid setup, and by that i mean any setting that specifically references or uses the term "raid." Since i don't know a large amount of terminology it's possible that there are other settings that would imply such a setup that i am just reading over. That being the case, i will definitely start looking up all of the setting and terms that i don't recognize, so thanks for the tip :).
I also made sure that the drive was formatted prior to setup (as TerryF suggested). Thankfully i figured out how to get the system to print more information during boot, so after my 5th attempt at re-installing and booting SME here's what's printed prior to the "GRUB Hard Disk Error" ...
Verifying DMI Pool Data ............
Try (hd0,0): EXT2: No grldr
Try (hd0,1): non-MS: skip
Try (hd0,2): invalid or null
Try (hd0,3): invalid or null
BIOS: Drive=0x0, H=2, S=18
Try (fd0): invalid or null
Cannot find grld
Press Space bar to hold the screen, any other key to boot from previous MBR ...
Timeout: GRUB Hard Disk Error _
Sooooo, to me it seems like the BIOS or whatever is in charge of verifying the DMI Pool Data is looking for a Microsoft OS/MS code (due to the "No grldr" and "non-MS," right??). Assuming that the drive is completely formatted (which it is - I've formatted it close to 6 times while running Wary Puppy) then there must be something in the BIOS that is unable to recognize linux-based code or file formats (since Ext2 is exclusive to linux as i understand)...??
I guess at this point i will try flashing the bios, but as i mentioned before i've been through all of the BIOS' setup menus and sub menus and i have no clue what would make the system MS exclusive.
If any of you have a different take on the information provided in the code or have any other recommendations at this point, please let me know :-D.
(**EDIT i'm also still curious as to why the grub.devices.map file would reference sdb (the usb drive) when i prompted the installer to configure a raid=0 setup; is this something that anyone else has encountered, or could perhaps explain? I still haven't found any other web pages that explain SME's installation of GRUB, but i will continue to look...**)
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Did you "dd" the drive or format it, they are different things..
Did you remove the USB at first boot? you did not say yay or nay..
Again, did you leave 1 HD in the box and leave the install to setup a degarded raid 1
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I've being reading your link for manual.
Enter in BIOS, choose Advanced, in SATA MODE choose "IDE". My bet it's configurated as RAID (it's default option as shown at page 7-6 of manual.
Regards
Jáder
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I would take a look at dmraid command
dmraid -r -E /dev/sdX
before doing so, man dmraid
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Proto12
(**EDIT i'm also still curious as to why the grub.devices.map file would reference sdb (the usb drive) when i prompted the installer to configure a raid=0 setup; is this something that anyone else has encountered, or could perhaps explain? I still haven't found any other web pages that explain SME's installation of GRUB, but i will continue to look...**)
You are setting up RAID 0 which is using your internal hard disk and the USB drive to create a striped array.
You probably do not want to do that.
A better choice would be
sme raid=none
Refer http://wiki.contribs.org/Booting