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.