RedHat 9 install cannot open root device and kernel panic

[Rick Stevens]

Allen, Catherine wrote:
>>Didn't load the correct driver for the RAID card.  I'm not 
>>familiar with that particular model of HP machine.  
>>What kind of RAID card is in it?
> 
> 
> The Proliant DL380 (G3) has a SmartArray 5i Plus.
> 
> I don't know if this is a RAID card or what - I don't want to have to open
> the box to find out.  Windows gave very little information about it.

Yes, it's a RAID card.  It can be used as a non-RAID also.

> The driver required is the cpq_cciss driver - which is in the standard
> drivers, I think, because when I booted "noprobe" from CDROM, the system
> could load the cciss driver and the installation continued to the next point
> (finding the CD - or in my case, not finding the CD).

Yes, that's a standard driver.  Have you checked HP's site for any
special driver disks for your system?

>>Is it a SCSI CD or an IDE CD? 
> 
> 
> I'm guessing that it's a SCSI CD.  So I need to boot linux without the
> noprobe option - but still get it to load the cciss driver to be able to see
> the logical drives?

It should see it without a noprobe.  Can you try the install in text
mode ("boot: linux text"), and check the other three consoles to see if
there's an issue?  Press ALT-F2, ALT-F3 and ALT-F4 to get to the other
consoles (ALT-F1 gets you back to the main install console).

>>How did the boot floppy know you would have an hda2 partition 
> 
> 
> It didn't (and I don't).  The screen says that if you don't type 
> anything within a certain timeframe, at the 
> boot :
> prompt, then the linux install will default to using /dev/hda2
> 
> I doubt that this is probed or anything, because I don't think I 
> have a /dev/hda2 - so I'm not surprised when it fails because it 
> doesn't recognise /dev/hda2

/dev/hda is an IDE drive.  When you "noprobe", lots of things go weird.
For some odd reason, your machine tells Linux you have an IDE drive.
Hmmm.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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