[CentOS] Installation problem, possibly RAID

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 22:58 -0400, Edward Diener wrote:
> I burned a DVD for CentOS 4.1. I booted from it and everything went fine for the 
> graphical screen installation. I choose separate partitions for my /boot (hde6), 
> / (hde9), and swap (hde12) areas. My /boot partition was ext2 and my / partition 
> was ext3. I installed grub in my /boot partition successfully. I have a Boot 
> Loader, System Commander 8.13 which controls the MBR. The installation then 
> nicely ejected my DVD disk, told me to remove any other installation media, and 
> rebooted my machine. It rebooted into System Commander, I chose the CentOS boot 
> partition, and this rebooted me to CentOS without a problem.
> 
> CentOS now finished its installation steps, among which was setting up a user 
> account, and attempted to bring up the login screen. My screen went dark, the 
> icon went to a waiting/turning icon for a long time, and I said to myself uh-oh. 
> Finally with most of the screen still dark a small message box appeared with an 
> OK button which said:
> 
> "Can not start the greeter program, you will not be able to log in. This display 
> will be disabled. Try logging in by other means and editing the configuration file."
> 
> I pressed OK, my screen went into text mode, and repeated lines of:
> 
> ext3-fs error
> (device hde9) in start transaction, Journal has aborted.
> 
> continued to fill the screen.
> 
> The only way to proceed was to hit the restart button of my computer.
> 
> My thoughts of possible reasons for the failure are these. My hard drive is off 
> of an HPT 374 Raid controller, without Raid being actually used on it, and is a 
> 160 GB hard drive, 147 GB formatted. The /boot (hde6) partition starts at 
> approximately the 56 GB boundary, the / (hde9) partition starts at approximately 
> the 76 GB, and the swap drive starts at approximately the 106 GB boundary.
> 
> Is it possible that I needed to turn on LBA32 as an install option, since there 
> was a screen where I could have checked it but did not ? Is it possible that I 
> needed to tell the install, when choosing my partitions for /boot,/, and swap 
> that this was a Raid controller, event though I am not using Raid with it, since 
> I noticed a Raid button on the Disk Druid graphical screen but used Edit instead 
> to set up my partitions ? Is it possible that CentOS either does not support my 
> Raid controller or supports it in some earlier release which does not work 
> properly even when not using Raid, so that I need to install the proper release 
> of it somehow during the installation process ?
> 
> I am groping for answers but am really hoping that someone has some knowledge of 
> this problem so that I can use CentOS. Everything went well until the final 
> disaster, and I was keen on getting CentOS to install on my computer. I had 
> previously tried FC4 previously but that wouldn't even get past my graphical 
> screen, failing because I have a Matrox P650 video adapter, but CentOS handled 
> it with aplomb. I am a relatively Linux newbie although an experienced software 
> developer and computer user, so if someone could help me get CentOS running it 
> would really be appreciated. Thank you !
----
sounds like you handled things right but I'm confused as to what
comprises things like /dev/hde1, hde2, hde3, hde4, hde5 etc.

is it possible for you to boot CD #1 again and type 'linux rescue' (no
quotes) at the boot prompt to enter rescue mode.

When it completes booting, it would be interesting to find out...

fdisk -l /dev/hde

(this will list the partitions)

you could try repairing the partitions...

e2fsck -fy /dev/hde6
e2fsck -fy /dev/hde9

Is this a dual-boot with Windows? If so, did Windows think any part of
hde to be part of a RAID array?

Craig