FW: [Quantian-general] Hard Drive Install

Thu Feb 16 02:16:28 UTC 2006

-----Original Message-----
From: Cecil Penn [mailto:cecil.penn at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 3:38 PM
To: 'Dirk Eddelbuettel'
Subject: RE: [Quantian-general] Hard Drive Install

Dirk,

Thanks for the fast reply.  Very enlightening!  Thank your for clearing up
my "l" vs "1" confusion and clarifying what init was.

Regarding minirt26.gz, I did get it and copy it to the appropriate directory
per the HOWTO.  So my previous email was with minirt26.gz.

To answer your question regarding LVM, I loaded FC4 on a very old PC with a
single IDE drive (i.e. no RAID) and in this case I do get hda1 in /dev.
However, fdisk reports the following:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/hda2              14        4870    39013852+  8e  Linux LVM

On the Proliant DL360 (with 2 scsi drives running as RAID 1), fdisk reports
the following:

         Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/ida/c0d0p1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/ida/c0d0p2              14        2213    17671500   8e  Linux LVM

Hence, I presume FC4 uses LVM on RAID and non-RAID systems.  When installing
FC4 on both systems, I had anaconda remove all partitions and partition the
drives per the default method.  So I think you are right that FC4 uses LVM.
I must admit I am still mystified on why the ide system has an hda1 and the
scsi system has an ida/c0d0p1 !

Thanks for your advice regarding Knoppix 4.0.2 to get around my problem.
I'll try that in the next few days.

Dirk, I hope you can indulge me with one more question.  Originally I
intended to use FC4 and openMosix to construct a small cluster.  However,
the current rpm for openMosix supports only the linux 2.4 kernel (hence, I
looked for a non-FC4 alternative...which is how I found Quantian).  From the
openMosix website, it appears that an rpm for the 2.6 kernel may be
available soon (I'm not sure what "soon" means at this point).  My question
is, do you think that openMosix release for the 2.6 kernel with FC4 would
present me with the same LVM problems I have now on my Proliant server?  One
other piece of data I found on the web is that some users have reported that
the openMosix 2.4 rpm works with FC1.

Thanks for the help!

Cecil

-----Original Message-----
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel [mailto:edd at debian.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 7:28 PM
To: Cecil Penn
Cc: quantian-general at lists.alioth.debian.org
Subject: Re: [Quantian-general] Hard Drive Install

Hi Cecil,

On 14 February 2006 at 14:34, Cecil Penn wrote:
| I've tried a hard drive installation of Quantian (per the "How to Boot
| Quantian via LILO or GRUB HOWTO") without success.  My "resident" linux
| installation is Fedora Core 4 running on an old Proliant DL360 (this
server
| has 2 scsi drives operating as raid 1).  FC4 works fine on this machine.
| I've copied the iso and kernels and initrd files to the locations
specified
| in the HOWTO.  I've also modified the GRUB menu.1st file per the HOWTO.

That should probably read menu.lst with an L ('Ell') instead of a 1 ('One').

Could be, or it could also mean that it fails on the ext2 filesystem.  There
were some reports + patches on the debian-knoppix list regarding a Knoppix
bug in the miniroot file where ext3 was used twice and ext2 was left out. I
*think* we have that fixed thanks to the corrected miniroot.gz by Marco.

That being said, for kernel 2.6 you now need minirt26.gz from the
quantian.alioth.debian.org site, not the one in miniroots.tar.gz [ which is
still mentioned in the HOWTO. ]

| First I confirmed that I copied the files to the correct directory.  It
| seems that FC4 has a file organization slightly different from what is
| assumed in the HOWTO, so I've tried the following variations in the
menu.1st
| file:  
| 
| 
| init=/etc/init	->	init=/sbin/init
| 			init/etc/init.d

I think you have that wrong. When grub's menu.lst sets init=/etc/init, it
refers to the system it wants to boot, ie Quantian, which has the /etc/init
link. So don't modify that please...

| bootfrom=/dev/hda1/*.iso	->	bootfrom=/dev/ida/c0d0p2/*.iso
| 					bootfrom=/dev/ida/c0d0p1/*.iso
| 	
| bootfrom=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00/*.iso

Uh-oh. Do you / does FC4 run LVM? That may well break it as the minirt26.gz
may not be set up for booting from LVM drives.

| The changed the init line because FC4 has no init file in /etc.  I wasn't
| sure if /etc/init was intended to be a file or directory, so I tried
| /sbin/init (a file) and the directory init.d.  I also tried the strange
| "ida/c0d0p1" because fdisk reports this as the boot partition and there is
| no "hda1" shown in fstab.  I also tried the "VolGroup00/LogVol00" because
| the menu.1st file has an option root=/dev/ VolGroup00/LogVol00 when
booting
| into the "resident" Fedora Core 4 OS (kernel version
2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp).
| 
| Each time I reboot, I receive the same error message as above.
| 
| What am I missing?  I'm afraid I'm very much a linux newbie (does it
show?)
| and any help would be appreciated.

You may be in a tough spot. The quickest workaround could be to grab the
Knoppix 4.0.2 cdrom release, burn that to cdrom and use it to boot into the
Quantian iso using the additional

	bootfrom=/dev/hda1/q*.iso

trick. Again, SCSI disks may dictate a different layout, and LVM may create
a
wrinkle. However, if Knoppix 4.0.2 can mount your disks for reading -- ie if
you can click on the icons on the desktop and get your files -- then you
should be fine.

Please report back, we should in any event try to keep the docs current so
suggestions or fixes are always welcome.

Hope this helps,  Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison