"Don't know whether I understand you correctly, but RAID1 array sync is
started with firstboot after the installation finished."

Err....no it doesn't.... it syncs the array as it installs, do a cntrl-alt-f3 when installing to bring a shell up then do a "watch cat /proc/mdstat"

and you can see it building the array as its installing, do a cntrl-alt-f7 to get back to the graphics screen.....

I did actually find what the problem was and this was it:

The SIS 965 chipset is not supported by the kernel so the IDE interfaces runs S-L-O-W-L-Y  eg 1.7Mb/sec transfer rate to the disk, coupled with the RAID rebuilding in the background makes the install take about 6 hours if it can actually manage to complete, which it usually doesn't on this platform.

The solution: change the motherboard.... so I put a sempron socket A board in its place with a 3200+ CPU and it works fine....

:-)

Am Do, den 21.07.2005 schrieb Peter Farrow um 10:03:

  

I have a K8S-MX Asus Athlon 64 Motherboard with a 754 pin 3000+ CPU, 
which I cam trying to install 4.1 Centos 64 bit.

The problem seems to arise when installing onto Mirrored disks,  I have 
noticed that from Centos 4 onwards it tries to rebuild the arrays as it 
installs which slows the whole process right down across all platforms I 
have tried it on.
    

Don't know whether I understand you correctly, but RAID1 array sync is
started with firstboot after the installation finished.

  

In addition, the install process bails out at random times with random 
errors eg.  "Disk Full", "error loading this package or that package",  
Error reading DVD etc... now I have burnt several copies of the DVD, 
tested them fully, tried installing from CD, even changed the hardware 
to a twin Opteron system, changed the RAM changed this disks and tried 
everything but it still seems really touch and go as to wether the 
install will complete.

I haven't managed it yet on the Asus platform it took about 12 goes on 
the opteron platform.  Yet Centos 3.4 installs no problem.
    

That can be caused by bad cabling (length + quality) because kernel 2.6
is more sensible for standards. It can too help to deactivate DMA during
install with: linux ide=nodma.

  

Finally the last straw was the boot loader problem with occurs either 
immediately after reboot after install or on one of the boots soon 
after, and I have to do this to fix it:
    

That is a known issue and filed in bugzilla.redhat.com. Didn't happen
for my platform, grub was correctly installed, just not placed into both
RAID1 drive's MBRs.

  

Pete
    

Alexander


  

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