[wplug] Install Question -- upstream (RHEL 4) initrd/support bug

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 13:22 -0400, Michael H. Semcheski wrote:
> The card is the 9650SE.

Nice.  I've installed a number of those, along with Areca (X-Scale) 1200
series.

At home, I'm still running on an original 7800 (original, full length
version of the 7500-8, with only 2MB SRAM instead of 4MB SRAM) -- 64-bit
@ 33MHz on a dual-P3 with a ServerSet III chipset.

> 3w-9xxx seems to be working.

BTW, did you manually unpack the initrd (gzip filesystem -- gzip -d and
then mount [read-only] on loopback) and check for it and the scsi and sd
modules?

> Unfortunately, when I boot into the rescue cd, there is /dev/sda1
> which has grub on it (apparently not installed correctly) and
> /dev/sda2, but I can't mount /dev/sda2 to get to /sbin/grub-install.
> This is (I think) because its an LVM volume.  There's something about
> "mount /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01 /mnt/sysimage", but I can't get
> the volume actually mounted, and thus I can't install grub.  Maybe the
> easiest thing is to get a knoppix cd, boot it, and run grub-install
> off of it.

Ahhh, yes, the upstream RHEL 4 Update 4/5 bugs.  Yes, this happens on
occasion with select LVM setups.  As much as I love LVM2, I don't quite
trust it for booting yet -- and I don't think I ever will on x86[-64]
because of the PC BIOS (don't get me started).

So I typically make three (3) legacy BIOS/DOS disk label (partition
table) slices (primary partitions), and then then the fourth is the LVM2
(8E) disk label.  One of the former is the / filesystem.  I don't even
mess with separate /boot (and haven't for a long time) -- that way I can
always get to /bin, /etc, /sbin, etc... despite the worst of
circumstances.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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        Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution