Help with Dell PE2950 and RAID5 setup

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Scott R Ehrlich wrote:
> I've got a new PE2950 rack system with PERC controller and 6 drives set up
> contiguously as one RAID5 volume on the PERC controller.
> 
> Using 64-bit CentOS 4.4, I partitioned for /boot having 100 Meg, swap
> having 2 gig, and / with the rest (removed LVM).
> 
> After the install was complete, the system rebooted and just gave me a
> broken grub prompt (not the graphical Grub boot selector, but grub>).
> 
> I fed it root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0) and rebooted.
> 
> I then got the grub gui, but also got the following after the attempted
> kernel boot:
> 
> Decompressing Linux...done.
> Booting the kernel.
> Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.8 starting
> sda: asking for cache data failed
> sda: assuming drive cache: write through
> sda: asking for cache data failed
> sda: assumint drive cache: write through
> EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
> block - inode=2132343, block=1231234
> mount: error 5 mounting none
> EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
> block - inode=123123, block=124324123
> EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
> block - inode=6353565, block=34634635
> WARNING: can't access (null)
> exec of init ((null)) failed!!!: 14
> EXT3-fs error (device sda3): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
> block - inode=1245546546, block=645243235
> 
> umount /initrd/dev failed: 5
> Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
> 
> 
> What might be wrong?   Bad hard drive?   This, again, is a fresh install,
> straight off the 64-bit CentOS 4.4 4 CD set.

What's kernel command line being used?  Specifically, what's the
"root=/dev/..." part?

We've had some issues at work recently with Dell servers + linux when we tried
to update the kernel from the shipped version.  Basically, the RAID hardware
needs some oddball driver, and Dell's advice was to not update the kernel.
That doesn't seem to be your issue though, since otherwise the install
wouldn't have worked...

Matt

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