* thomas timpo ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [081209 23:23]: > Hello, > > I have been working as QA Engineer on a team that is using FAI to deploy > linux clusters on a few hundred machines for testing. The machines that we > are experiencing this issue on have 3 or 4 disk controllers and 12 or more > disks. We are running into a problem where Fai decides to start installing > to a different disk. Because the bios is set to boot off of the disk on the > onboard disk controller, it will boot into the previous installation of > debian etch, while the new install will sit on some other disk, typically on > a different controller. Has anybody else experienced issues like this with > fai?
yes. there are several problems involved: - grub can only install stuff on the first 8 disks (in bios order) and the disk you try to install to might not be reachable for grub. - the controllers can be detected in funny orders. in my case grub had different perceptions of what the first disk at kernel run time and boot time. I could solve my problems by not loading the kernel module for the off-board controllers in the initrd (by both blacklisting it and loading it in /etc/modules). that put the on board controller always first. furthermore i use UUIDs or LVM everywhere.
