Ufortunately this is going to be complicated to explain, but I'll try to be coherent...
I installed rhel4 onto a single cciss disk (on a machine that has 2 of them) and took an image. I then successfully installed ithat image on 6 other machines multiple times without error. I then wanted to see if SI could deal with rhel3 which has an older version of grub that I know to have problems. The first odd thing about the installation was it complained about the disk geometery, claming something was inconsistent and did I want to ignore it (feels like this was caused by SI). I said yes, assuming the installation process could deal with it but I also manually deleted/recreated all the partitions just to have a known quantity. I gave the first one the label /boot and made it 100MB. The second I defined as swap and made it 2048MB and the third as / telling it to fill the available space. The one curious thing was that when I looked at the disk layout a small chunk of free space was inserted in front of the boot partitions and so /boot didn't start at the beginning. In any event, the system built/booted correctly. I took an image with system imager and was able to reimage the target system and boot it. Next, I tried to put the rhel4 system back on top of the system than had the rhel3 image on it. The resultant system wouldn't boot and actually hung in the middle of the process. I took a screen shot and can forward it if anyone cares. But perhaps more important, I tried again to put down a rhel3 image and it succeeded and booted. I went back and tried to reload rhel4 but this time with an exit statement in the autoinstall script so I could see any errors that were generated. Since I didn't know how to capture them in a file, here they are as typed in by me: Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time. end_requesst: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 [repeated 14 times] Installation finished. No errors reported. This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map. Check if this is correct or not. If any of teh lines is incorrect, fix it and re-run the script 'grub-install'. (fd0) /dev/fd0 (hd1) /dev/cciss/c0d0 (hd2) /dev/cciss/c0d1 WARNING: Label SW-cciss/c0d0p2 not found anywhere on the system! at /usr/lib/sysconfig/Boot/Grub.pm line 207 Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time. end_requesst: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time. end_requesst: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 Please press Enter to activate this console. It feels like SystemImager is not recreating the partions identical to what they used to be and more importantly, it would seem that it's possible to have a valid partition table (in this case one from rhel3) on a system that you want to replace with a different one (generated from rhel4) can can't. In summary, I now have 2 images, one for rhel3 and one for rhel4. The rhel3 WILL install on a system that previously had rhel3 but the rhel4 won't install on that same system! I suppose the next test is to try installing the rhel3 system on one that used to be home for rhel4 but wouldn't you know it, I'm having network problems right now and can't do it. In any event, I have seen issues in the past with version 3.2.0 where SI got confused when existing partitions weren't consistent with what was trying to be installed and I think this time I have the ideal environment to debug it if you're game. Just tell me what files you'd like to see and what tests to try. -mark Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Sisuite-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-devel
