FW: [Quantian-general] Hard Drive Install

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Cecil,

Thanks for reposting to the list. It is better to let a searchable archive
grow, and it also exposes your question to more eyeballs.

On 15 February 2006 at 19:16, Cecil Penn wrote:
| 
| 
| -----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

So here /dev/hda1 is a nornal 'type 83' linux file system from which you
could boot, if it weren't for that ext2 bug in Knoppix we mentioned
before. As Marco suggested, switching to the newer / corrected minirt he
pointed to may correct that. That said, that partition is probably way to
small anyway.  The other one is in fact LVM and you may be out of luck.
 
| 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.  

Normally a good choice to go with defaults, but in this case it may mean that
you cannot boot Quantian from hard disk using grub/lilo as LVM may not be
supported by Quantian. 

| 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

Yes, openMosix for 2.6 is a few years late and still unfinished. If you want
openMosix, stick with 2.4 kernels.

| 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.

The two issues are entirely orthogonal. You have booting issues because of
LVM due to you having accepted the FC4 defaults.  

And openMosix 2.4 works regardless of how you boot.

Hope this helps, Dirk

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