Re: ATARAID RH 7.3, need startup disk ... RH9?
From: Nico Kadel-Garcia (nkadel_at_verizon.net)
Date: 09/27/03
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Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 18:26:14 GMT
Anthony Presley wrote:
> Hello all.... sorry for the cross-post, but it applies everywhere....
>
> It has been a rough week. I have some questions, to which I cannot
> test the answers to (until Monday), and though I'd come seeking some
> help ... my Googling hasn't come up too well.
>
> Several months ago we bought a system from Monarch Computer, equipped
> with a Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P, which has a FastTrack RAID controller on
> it. I installed the controller, and dual 80GB hard drives, which
> after some trouble, I settled on the native ataraid driver, running RH
> 7.3.
You bought a Promise RAID card. That was a *serious* mistake. Promise
not only sucks in Linux driver support, they suck period in quality
control and in ever actually answering letters or telephone calls. They
only get business because their chips come with great *published*, not
real, specifications, and they're slightly cheaper.
Do not use them. Replace the system with a 3Ware controller or SIIG
controller ASAPl.
> It's been running fine, until this morning, when I totally hosed it.
> Lack of sleep, no attention to detail, etc... and I went ahead and did
> a system upgrade to it. To the latest GLIBC, from RH 9. Most of our
> other systems are RH9, I completely forgot this one wasn't, and when
> the package I was installing requested the new GLIBC, it didn't
> register. Bad, bad, bad sysadmin.
Bad. No biscuit. You badly need to either do a forklift upgrade to RH 9,
or get at this machine's console with a set of RedHat 8 or 9 CD's and
boot into rescue mode, and use the network or CD drive to download and
install the older glibc packages.
> We rely on some programs that must stay on RH 7.3, so it cannot be
> upgraded, but I don't have a nice boot/rescue disk that will do the
> ATA RAID. Booting from the stock RH 7.3 ISO discs, RH finds no hard
> drives, and has no way to do ataraid. The hard drives are mirrored,
> and the / partitions are ext3, with the other partitions on LVM.
>
> I have the weekend to locate an acceptable "downgrade" solution, or,
> at worst, a complete reformat and load from tape. However, it would
> appear from the solution at
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/5/2003/09/1/57607 that
> there is a possible solution.
Ouch. You mean you put your boot OS on the Promise RAID controller? Of
course, Promise will not tell you which chipet the particular Fastrack
controller uses. They seem to pretend that they don't use chips, because
there is literally *NO WAY* to get them to tell you what chipset a
device uses without buying one and dismantling it to read the chips or
having a kernel that already knows about it.
In the meantime: can you get someone onsite to plug in a RedHat 9 boot
CD and see if you can boot to rescue mode with it? Since RH 9 uses a
nice 2.4.x kernel with a lot of drivers backported to it from newer
kernels, you may be able to boot with it enough to get into rescue mode
and salvage the mess.
> My question:
>
> a. If I boot from a RH9 disk 1 (ISO) instead of RH7.3, will it find
> the /dev/ataraid/d0 and /dev/ataraid/d1? If not, can I drop to a
> shell and load up the kernel modules to find them?
See above. *MAYBE*. The Promise controller chipset has to be included in
the kernel. Did you have to compile and install a custom kernel to see
these RAIDsets?
> b. Will the RH9 ISO locate the LVM partitions? If not, can I somehow
> locate them?
See above. *MAYBE*. And why are you wasting time and CPU with LVM on a
server with a hardware RAID controller? Do you have somewhere on backup
or offsite a tape with your old /etc/fstab and LVM settings, for reference?
> c. Assuming I've managed to find the drives / partitions, is it then
> feasible to load up the RH 7.3 disk's in cdrom1, and perform a rpm
> -ivh --force --root /mnt/sysimage/ glibc*.rpm binutils*.rpm
> tcp_wrapper*.rpm
*FIRST*, try this:
cp glibc*.rpm binutils*.rpm tcp_wrapper*.rpm /mnt/sysimage/tmp
chroot /mnt/sysimage
rpm -Uvvh --replacepkgs --oldpackage {packages.rpm}
I've never trusted the rpm "--root" command.
> d. If these aren't valid, is there a standard distrib / kernel I can
> build / setup an ISO to burn for them to locate the drives and do the
> downgrade?
See above. Promise is *VERY, VERY, VERY* bad about Linux support. They
say their stuff is compatible, and then they publish drivers that do
stupidities like auto-renumber your IDE controllers so the Promise
controllers are *always* first. That drove me nuts when I did a kernel
change and had to rewrite fstab depending on which kernel I booted with,
because a manager refused to permit us to use partition labels.
> The goal is to bring up the system asap on Monday morning, so we can
> all get back to work.
Good freaking luck. Sounds like you need a kernel/hardware consultant,
*NOW*. Is your contact address on the posting valid? And what part of
the country is the target machine in? I may be able to recommend any of
several people in different parts of New England, the CA kernel people
don't know an IDE connector from a CVS command.
> Thanks for your feedback. I'll be posting results (I can't be the
> only person with a ATARAID drive running LVM who needs a rescue disk).
- Previous message: Davide Bianchi: "Re: System logging not working."
- In reply to: Anthony Presley: "ATARAID RH 7.3, need startup disk ... RH9?"
- Next in thread: Anthony Presley: "Re: ATARAID RH 7.3, need startup disk ... RH9?"
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