Booting Suse7.3 from a Promise Ultra100 TX2 card; solved

[Michael James]

I didn't ask this on the list
 but FWIW here is how to get Suse to boot from a non-RAID Promise card.

I have an ex-ANU-Beowulf Epox KP6BS twin PIII 550.
The 40Gig Seagate barracuda 4 disk hangs off
 a Promise Ultra100 TX2 ide controller card.

The install that YaST2 gave failed at boot
 hanging with just  LI  or  LIL-  on the screen.

It's a disk geometry problem,
 using lba32 helped when the disk was on on the motherboard IDE controller
 but not on the promise.

Note the different symptoms:

	Hanging on LI	= geometry
	Getting the lilo menu but ending in "kernel panic,
	 unable to mount root file system" = driver or fstab problem

http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/sf_udma_boot.html

describes this and gives a formula for manual geometry settings
 to be added to /etc/lilo.conf. For a 40Gig Barracuda IV

disk    = /dev/hde
sectors = 63
cylinders = 4866
heads   = 255

To get them in, install the disk where you want it.
Say Master of primary IDE of controller card = hde

Boot of CD1 of the install,
 choose Rescue, log in as root (no password).

It will say "have a lot of fun". (As unauthenticated root, heh heh)

Get the geometry from /var/log/boot.msg

mount /dev/hde2 /mnt   # or whichever partition is your root
mount /dev/hde1 /mnt/boot   # whatever number is /boot

cd /mnt
vi etc/fstab      # if you have moved the disk to a different ide chain
vi etc/lilo.conf  # make any changes and add the geometry to the global section

lilo -v -r /mnt

umount /mnt/boot
umount /mnt

press reset

This will recover a system even if you moved the disk and fstab is wrong.

-- 
A right not exercised is a privilege
a privilege not exercised is illegal.

Michael James			michael at james.st
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