I'm trying to install RHEL4 on an IBM e325 server. That's a dual-opteron, with mptscsi. Anaconda, just after starting, goes to run 'findrootparts' according to vt3. It then prints "parted got I/O error from sda" or the like. In the Anaconda window, a dialog "I/O error from /dev/sda" pops up, with the choices "Retry, Ignore, Cancel". No matter what choice I choose, the dialog pops up again. For each retry, vt3 shows the "parted got I/O error" message. Over in vt2, I ran parted against sda. It runs fine, showing me the partition list correctly. /proc/partitions sees all the partitions. I don't know how anaconda is calling parted, because I can't get any error in vt2. Over in vt4, the dmesg output shows mptscsi IOC errors, with the message "parted used deprectated ioctl, please update". I was under the impression that message was informative, but wouldn't return an error. The end result, however, is that RHEL4 is uninstallable on this machine. I surmise it is due to the mptscsi driver not supporting the deprecated ioctl, though I don't know what ioctl it is. I can't find the right parted invocation to reproduce it on vt2, and a quick grep of the anaconda sources doesn't enlighten me either.
Turns out to be a BIOS issue with the Fusion-MPT card. Updated BIOS is at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/pc_servers/26r0694.iso for the e325.
did you also use the boot parameters hpet=disable acpi=noirq