Fedora Core 5 Install Nightmare.

[astrocrep]

Ok my system specs are as follows:

AMD Opteron 165 (Dual Core 64bit)
2gb RAM
nVidia 7800GT
DFI nForce 4 Ultra M/B
2 x SATA WD Raptors in Raid 0 (Setup in BIOS as Raid) (Each Drive = 34gb, Array = 68gb)
1 x SATA 320GB
1 x IDE 200GB
No Other PCI cards.
And No Overclock What-so-ever

What my intentions where:
- Install FC5 64bit on to Raid 0 array and run off of that.

What happened:

First boot off the cd, everything seemed to load up fine, started up Anaconda, then started up X and said something like: "nVidia Unknown Device 0092"
And then loaded up X

However when X loaded the screen was uber messed up. I could make out the Fedora backdrop and see where the buttons where, but it was really badly messed up, and froozen.

The mouse worked clicking where the buttons looked like they were did nothing, and any keystrokes including ctrl + alt + bkspace and ctrl + alt + del did nothing.

Rebooted.

Made it preform a textmode install. Everything seemed to go ok Installation was using LVM on /dev/mapper/nvidia_***** copied over all of the packages, installed grub, DID NOT ask me to make a user account. Then rebooted.

When the computer rebooted All I got was a "GRUB _" and then the system hung.

Side note, I used both the 32bit and 64bit Distro DVDs.

I don't care if I use the Bios raid controller or the Linux Software Raid Controller (I have no idea how)

I just want to get it up and running.

I know all my H/W is good, the system ran flawlessly in xp for about 6months.

Thanks in advance for the help!
Rich

[tox_yray]

Flawless hardware on Windows does not mean flawless hardware on linux. Physically, we know your hardware is fine. However the drivers/firmware of your graphic card or motherboard (your two nVidia devices) seems not to work with linux just yet.

If it is the card:
Is the card very recent? Because that might be the problem.

If it is the nForce system:
Dude, my nForce system works just fine, but I'm on 32-bit architecture. That might cause some trouble, but I'd doubt it. So it's probably the graphic card.

Does your nForce system have an integrated graphic chip you could use as a backup to debug the AGP card? If so, unplug the AGP card and plug your screen on the nForce output and reinstall with 64-bit media.

As for the user account, don't worry, it'll be set only after first-boot. You should have a root password though.

I hope this helps.

[astrocrep]

Ohh ok about the user account. My Graphics card is a PCI-Express, and is about 8 or 9 months old.

Do you (anyone) have any good links or info about installing on a Raid array.

Thanks,
Rich

[pparks1]

I know all my H/W is good

Ah yes, but as tx_yray states, it might NOT be compatible with Linux (yet). It's unfortunate, but when I make recommendations for Linux hardware, I usually don't use the cutting edge components that are available, but instead suggest slightly older chipsets which have been around for awhile and have a better chance of working with Linux.

For example, i just build the machine in my sig block in Feb of 2006. For a variety of reasons, I specifically opted to NOT use the nForce4 chipset because of numerous compatibility problems that I had read about. I also went for the 32-bit version of FC even though I have a 64-bit CPU because of the difficulties with the 64-bit version (and I see you did try the 32-bit as well).

Finally, It seems that Fedora (and Linux in general) is still having problems with booting and recognizing SATA drives. For this reason, I have stuck with IDE drives to boot and use the SATA drives for storage. Kindof a bummer, but it works flawlessly for me and IDE drives are plenty fast enough for what I need.

I know I haven't given you anything really helpful to go on, but hopefully you can do some searching and find posts with others with similar hardware that have gotten around the problems you are experiening.

[tox_yray]

Info you are looking for is probably there:

http://www.faqs.org/contrib/linux-raid/x37.html

Watch out for your 64-bit arch though. There might be special recommendations.

[astrocrep]

I figure Ill just drop down to the 32bit arch, at least that may rule out some issues.

I really want to install and boot off of the raid 0 array, if I cannot, this might just be the deal breaker...

Thanks,
Rich

[tox_yray]

The problem might be in your RAID controller's drivers: they probably are not built in the FC5 kernel, therefore probably there not even installed. I suggest you build a kernel with the drivers for your specific RAID controller.

[astrocrep]

I read on a couple of sites that I will NOT be able to do Raid 0 because grub will have no clue on how to actually find the kernel.

So what I will be mostlikely doing is:

hda (200gb) /
Raid0_Array /home
sda (320gb) /Movies

I can (atleast I think I can) make the raid0 array function as /home during install...

this way if I can atleast get an installed system, I can trying grabbing a different copy of the nVidia drivers and hopefully all will be good.

Comments, Suggestions, Advice?

Thanks for the help,
Rich

[tox_yray]

Yup, that would be an idea. If the kernel is on an IDE partition, it will work out of the box. However, for the nVidia driver, make sure you fetch the official ones on nVidia's website. Third party ones exist, but nothing works like legitimate

[nox771]

I read on a couple of sites that I will NOT be able to do Raid 0 because grub will have no clue on how to actually find the kernel.

I just recently went through a painful raid install of FC5. My summary thread is here:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=107477

It is true you cannot boot from a raid0, however there is a simple workaround. You can create a raid1 partition for /boot using the first 100MB or so off each raid0 drive. One thing about the software raid setup is that you can partition a drive and raid the partitions differently from each other. On my setup I have 4 drives with separate raid1, raid5, and raid10 spanning the 4 (/boot on raid1, / on raid5, and /usr/local, /home, and /data on the raid10). It works great. I've used bonnie++ to benchmark it, and I do see the associated speed improvements I would expect.

Of course if I could I would have raid10 the whole thing, but FC5 doesn't support that, and I didn't want to add in a separate boot drive.

Oh and this is on an x86_64 dual core system, so there is no issue with kernel/drivers and whatnot.

As far as the earlier bits regarding the video, I am running a nvidia 7600GS PCI-E card and it works great. I did have to install the drivers after the main install (downloaded from nvidia site). Actually I had to install the newest kernel, and kernel source in order to get the nvidia install script to compile the module, but it did work once I did that (do it with: yum install kernel, and yum install kernel-devel). Now its working great also (actually given my past struggles with video cards, this one was relatively painless in that regard). Again this is all on x86_64.

[astrocrep]

Very interesting...

A couple of quick questions.

1.) Do I need to have the Raid array built in Bios / nv controller? Or is this just a software thing.

2.) How, during the install can I built these raid arrays. Can you point me to some good info or more info from your experience?

Thanks A LOT!

Rich

[nox771]

1.) Do I need to have the Raid array built in Bios / nv controller? Or is this just a software thing.

No, this would be a software raid setup, so you want the BIOS to control the drives as regular SATA drives, not as a raid volume.

Note in case your wondering, from what I've read elsewhere the raid controllers such as those in the nForce4 are actually running some type of software in the BIOS (essentially doing software RAID from the BIOS), so in doing software raid on a fast CPU you aren't going to be losing any performance. At least thats the understanding I've got from info elsewhere. The benchmark numbers I've seen on my setup seem to agree with this.

2.) How, during the install can I built these raid arrays. Can you point me to some good info or more info from your experience?

I'll try off the top of my head to explain (I don't have the installer in front of me, so hopefully you get the gist of it - also I'm assuming this is a blank system with no existing data - adjust accordingly if needed).

- First, boot up the install CD. When you get to the part where it asks about partitioning the drive, select a custom installation.

- Once you get in the disk druid tool you should see your two blank SATA drives in there

- Click on the RAID button, tell it you want to create a Software RAID partition. Create a 100MB partition at the beginning of the drive (it should show up as /dev/sda1 or such). Then repeat this for the other drive (/dev/sdb1).

- After you have your two 100MB partitions, click on the RAID button again and tell it you want to create a RAID device. Create the device from the partitions above. It should end up as /dev/md0. Format it ext3 with mount point /boot. Set the raid type to raid1.

- Now you can either create your swap now or later - however I would usually do it now. If you do it later make sure to leave some space somewhere. You could also put it on one of your other drives if you don't want to take a chunk out of your raid drives. Lets say you want 1GB of swap and you want it on the raid drives. Create a new partition on the first drive of size 500MB, assign it to swap. Repeat for the second drive. This would be /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2. Together these give you 1GB of swap (and I've read that supposedly the kernel is good at load balancing between the two swap partitions, but I don't know for sure).

- Now for the raid0. Click on the RAID button again. Create a Software RAID partition on the first drive. Tell it to fill to max size. Do the same for the other drive. This should give you the bulk of your drives in /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3. Note if you have swap on these drives sometimes disk druid reverses the location of the raid and swap partitions to put the swap at the end of the drive. Not a problem either way.

- Click on the RAID button again, and tell it you want to create a RAID device. Create the device with those two big partitions, it should create /dev/md1. Format as ext3, set the raid type to raid0, and mount point to /

After that you should be done with disk druid, as far as the raid goes. Setup your other drives as needed of course. Booting is a different story. If your BIOS is setup to boot the SATA drives (not your other drives), then cross your fingers and hopefully everything will boot after the install. If not then you may have to do the procedure I describe below (cut and pasted from the other thread):

Now another thing I ran into was that the RAID1 install seemed to sometimes put the bootloader in the wrong place. For some reason I think the BIOS (or the FC5 installer) was reordering the drives as:
/dev/sdc
/dev/sdd
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb

In effect swapping the controller order, so the bootloader consistently seemed to swap /dev/sda and /dev/sdc. In all the grub.conf files everything was (hd2,0) instead of (hd0,0). I figured this would be a problem. More web searches revealed that on a RAID1 it is possible that not all of the drives were getting the bootloader (which is necessary in case the typical boot drive fails), so once install completed and I got in the system (fortunately my system booted, but I think this is doable from the rescue CD) I did the following:

1) Fix the bad stuff in grub.conf - changed all (hd2,0) to (hd0,0)
2) Ran grub
3) Then setup grub for each drive:
grub> device (hd0) /dev/sda
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> device (hd0) /dev/sdb
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
etc...
grub> quit

Ideally everything will work fine when it reboots. On my system it seemed to. If not then post again and we can work it out. You can deal with the video driver after you get the install and boot worked out. Actually all the above assumes you are getting into the graphical install - text install should have similar options for the raid, but I haven't done it that way so I'm not sure exactly what the sequence is.

[astrocrep]

I am doing it right now,

Everything seems ok, but my choice for HDD is not /dev/sda or something like that, it just gives me the mapper...

And when I enter grub, it complains of invalid signature...

RAID is disabled in Bios so... idk... I am going to messing around with it...

Please kick me some comments.

Thanks,
Rich

[nox771]

Everything seems ok, but my choice for HDD is not /dev/sda or something like that, it just gives me the mapper...

And when I enter grub, it complains of invalid signature...

RAID is disabled in Bios so... idk... I am going to messing around with it...

I'm not quite clear on where you are encountering problems - post install or during install?

If you are having problems with the installer trying to use the HW raid drivers, you can force it off by using the nodmraid option at the boot prompt of the install disc - "linux nodmraid"

I should have also added that I am not using LVM in my setup, so I can't offer any help there if you want to use LVM.

[astrocrep]

Yep, I just did nodmraid... and that seems to do the trick.

I am setting up the raid arrays as you said, pre-install

Ill be posting back asap.

Thanks,
Rich