Installed on SATA, SW RAID, LVM, but won't boot

[Frank]

After trying everything I could think of the get my Adaptec 2410SA 
controllers to work with FC3, (like they used to!) I gave up and tried 
another approach.  Both motherboards described below have four SATA 
ports on the board.  I pulled the adaptec cards out, enabled the SATA 
controllers (but not the BIOS RAID mode) on the boards, and plugged in 
the drives.  I don't expect Linux SW raid to give me the same striping 
performance that the 2410SA w/RAID 10 would, but at this poiunt I jsut 
want SOMETHING to work.

In both cases, all four drives were recognized.  I created a mirrored 
boot, and LVM partition on the first two drives, as well as a 
non-mirrored SWAP partition on each.  The third and fourth drives went 
to a single LVM partition.

In the LVM I created a fair sized / filesystem and a couple other larger 
ones.  The installation proceeded smoothly on both systems

But neither one will boot.  I can see everything if I boot of the 
install DVD, but if I try to boot from the  hard drive I get a blank 
screen with a flashing cursor, and that's all.

I've been working pretty much continuously on this for a day and a half 
now with no joy.  I had some time this weekend to get these systems 
configured (a rare luxury) and so far I can't even get the initial 
installation done.

Can anyone help?

Frank.


Frank wrote:

> One month prior to FC3 being released I installed FC2 on a system with 
> an Adaptec 2410SA Serial ATA RAID controller and a four drive array.  
> As I recall, it installed easily without a driver disk.  When FC3 came 
> out I did a fresh install on the same system, and it installed easily 
> and ran well.
>
> Last week I bought another system with the same controller, but with a 
> different motherboard.  I needed to move the working array to the new 
> system, where the boot would begin and then crash with a message about 
> sleeping in the wrong context or something like that.  I decided to 
> install cleanly.
>
> To make a long story short I now have two systems, one with an Asus 
> K8N-E and one with an Asus A8V motherboard, both with freshly 
> initialized 4 drive arrays, and I can't install AMD64 FC3 to either 
> one of them.  In each case the install proceeds to the partitioning 
> stage.  It appears that the moment FC3 attempts to partition the array 
> the controller card's alarm sounds and FC3 reports that it could not 
> read the disk.  On reboot, both controllers report the array status as 
> being optimal., and all format/initialize/array creation operations 
> have gone just fine.
>
> I have tried using the adaptec CD to make a driver disk.  Fedora is 
> not a lsited option - I tried ES3 and the resulting disk was not 
> accepted by FC3 (no driver found).  I looked at choosing simply 
> "Redhat" but then AMD64 was not an option.
>
> One of these systems is exactly the same as what worked well over the 
> last couple months on FC2 and FC3, except that it now has larger 
> drives in it.  The motherboard in the other one (The A8V) seems to be 
> a popular choice for Linux.  I don't see any messages suggesting that 
> FC3 has a problem with either motherboard.
>
> So why does FC3 suddenly seem to be incompatible with the Adaptec 
> 2410SA controllers that worked in the past for me and seem to be 
> working for other people as well?
>
> I'm out of things to try at this point.  The shiny new computers that 
> I was so looking forward to (finally replacing Windows with Linux on 
> my home network) are very expensive paperweights until I solve this.  
> Any help will be gratefully received.
>
> (I haven't played with any boot options.  I don't know what the 
> options are or when to use them)
>
> Frank.
>