[TriLUG] hardware problems -- install won't boot
Ryan Wheaton
ryan.wheaton at comcast.net
Tue Mar 30 14:53:21 EST 2004
hey y'all.
i'm having a hardware failure somewhere and i can't seem to pinpoint
it. I *think* it's a problem with one of the hard drives, but not
quite sure.
there are 3 identical drives in it on an IDE RAID controller. Whenever
I have all three drives active in the logical drive (RAID 0), then the
install will complete, but when it comes time to boot, I get a kernel
panic:
crcerror<6> freeing initrd memory:
VFS: cannot open root device "LABEL=/" or 00:00
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00
If i do the install with a certain drive (channel 3) not included in
the logical drive, then it boots up fine. This makes me think that the
drive is bad...
I booted to the rescue disk, and ran fsck on it, and it just kept
looping through hundreds of inode misconfigurations, but never said
anything about bad blocks.
I suspected that possibly the memory was bad as well, so I downloaded
the ISO version of Memtest86+ and ran those tests. Memtest stopped
responding in the exact same spot each time I ran it. I tried running
it on each stick of memory individually, but got the same results. I
think this might have something to do with the fact that memtest was on
a CD, and I was unable to set the ECC option (there is ECC ram in it).
So, I plan on calling Dell and warranting the drive, but wanted to make
sure there isn't anything I haven't tried yet to pinpoint the
problem... I think that the fact that an install works without the
drive, but not with the drive tells me a lot... But I might put memtest
on a floppy just to be sure...
thanks for listening ;-)
-rtw
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