[CentOS] Re: Fighting some install issues with a new box -- Bridge B and J92?

[Sean O'Connell]

On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 20:51 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> > - I had to disable the floppy settings in the BIOS (no floppy drive in
> > the machine, but it was enabled in the bios)
> 
> Shouldn't affect it, as floppy disks are assigned as BIOS disk 00h (A:),
> 01h (B:), and fixed disks are assigned BIOS disk 80h (C:), 81h (D:),
> etc...

I was kind of thinking this might be a red herring, but, unfortunately,
the change was done at the same time as the other change. So much for
the good scientific principle of changing one variable at a time.

> Hmmm, depends.  Linux is fairly good on auto-detecting geometry, even
> when the BIOS and legacy BIOS/DOS Disk Label differ.
> 
> The problem is if you wrote the GRUB MBR when you booting into the
> Rescue disk and it was using a different geometry.  Then yes, that would
> dork it up.  @-ppp

I don't think it ever was written to properly from install, and grub-
install didn't work period until I made the two aforementioned changes.

> > 2) The kernel/linux does *NOT* see the 3Ware card,
> 
> What about the BIOS?
> The ServerBIOS will list all storage cards it sees.
> It should let you select what boot device you want.

I do see the 3Ware BIOS at boot. Trouble is once the box has booted, no
love.

> Hmmm, it's like the PCI-X busses are not even there.
> Sometimes BIOSes can be configured to snoop all PCI busses.
> Also try resetting all configuration data.
> 
> This is very troubling.
> 
> > Should I not see the card? I wonder if this chipset is not fully
> > supported by the 2.6.9-11ELspm kernel?
> 
> Has _nothing_ to do with the chipset.  All chipset are APIC/I2C
> compliant, and present a PCI bus as a PCI bus -- be it bridged, HT'd,
> etc... PCI, PCI-X, PCIe.
> 
> So, going back into the ServerBIOS, is there a setting for various card
> BIOS detections?

I'll poke around some more manana.

> > Or does anyone have any suggestions for kernel flags? 
> 
> Hmmm, I don't think "noapic" will help you here.
> 
> It's clearly a PCI-X bus detection issue -- be it the POST not
> configuring the chipset registers, or the Linux kernel just not seeing
> anything.
> 
> I'd clearly point to the POST, if you're not seeing it as an available
> boot card in the BIOS.

See above. Card is seen during POST.

> > In dmesg output I see
> > 3ware Storage Controller device driver for Linux v1.26.00.039.
> > 3w-xxxx: No cards found.
> 
> Hmmm, so you did try manually loading the driver, eh?

Yeppers. No love.

> > I could try moving the 3Ware card to one of the slower PCI-X slots and
> > see if that helps. Perhaps, I will give this a whirl manana. I am at
> > least encouraged that the bloody thing installs and boots on its own :)
> 
> Yeah, try Bridge B and slowing it down to 66MHz by closing J92.
> 
-- 
Sean O'Connell
Office of Engineering Computing         oconnell at soe.ucsd.edu
Jacobs School of Engineering, UCSD      858.534.9716 (49716)