On 11/23/10 5:56 AM, Toralf Lund wrote:
I should perhaps mention that I found a solution, sort of: It seems like the problem is that the system simply won't boot from a single hard disk set up as just that - a single, separate drive. I suspect this has something to do with the disk/RAID controller firmware, but updating it did not help. If, on the other hand, I define (from within the controller setup screen) a "RAID" containing only one drive, everything works just fine...
Try nodmraid on the kernel line in grub - I needed this after one of the upgrades in the 5.x series.
The problem is that the system never gets to the grub stage, i.e. it fails to boot from hard drive at the BIOS level, so as to speak.
I haven't installed on an M3 yet, but that was also the case in the original 3550 model with the aacraid controller. The bios only sees the volumes as they are defined in the raid setup, even single drives. Another quirk I found was that the disks remember their positions even if you move them. For example, I cloned some drives with dd, and if I moved the one from the 2nd position into the first bay in another machine and told the raid controller to 'accept' it as-is, centos would see it as sdb (with the obvious confusing result when trying to repeat the clone process on that machine...). If there is a way to avoid this I'd like to know - initializing the drives was the slowest step of setting these machines up.