Description of problem: We are attempting to install RHEL Server 5.1 x86_64 on a Sun Ultra 40. The Sun is running Dual Opterons, has 16GB's of memory, dual Quadro NVidia cards and a 250GB SATA hard drive. The chipset appears to be nVidia's CK804. The installation works fine using defaults up until the point where anaconda attempts to format the first LVM. It appears to make it through the creation of all the inodes, but never quite completes. Eventually an error pops up in the GUI: "An error occurred trying to format VolGroup00/LogVol00. The problem is serious, and the install cannot continue." Output from dmesg at this time shows many timeouts waiting for ADMA IDLE (will attach output). After rebooting, the drive no longer is visible to the OS and doesn't show up in BIOS either. We have to reseat the drive to get it to show up again. Solaris 10 installs perfectly on this machine. We have tried the following: - Moved disk to different SATA slots - Used a different SATA drive (known working) - Upgraded machine BIOS to 1.6 - Tried booting with noacpi noapic and acpi=noirq None of the above resolves our issue. I would normally think this is the result of bad hardware, but as Solaris 10 installs perfectly on the machine I am thinking it may be a problem with the sata_nv driver. Attached are the output of dmesg, lspci and the /proc/scsi/scsi file. I will also open a support request with RH support for this issue and reference this bz. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Kernel included with stock 5.1 Server release How reproducible: Always
Created attachment 284501 [details] dmesg output
Created attachment 284511 [details] lspci output
Created attachment 284521 [details] /proc/scsi/scsi output
Created SR #1790490 with RH support for this.
Update on this. Per RH support we tried the installation _without_ LVM and so far it is proceeding just fine. Fails every time with the above symptoms however with LVM enabled.
Also, when creating the partitions and LVM by hand (from command prompt while still at the welcome screen) also lets the install complete just fine. We are able to create a custom layout with the LVM defined by hand and anaconda appears to have no troubles formatting. So it seems only when we leave the LVM and partition creation up to the GUI do we have issues. Am not sure if the lvm commands I used are the same as the ones anaconda uses: # lvm pvcreate /dev/sda2 # lvm vgcreate VolGroup00 /dev/sda2 -s 32M # lvm lvcreate -L 2G -n LogVol01 VolGroup00 # lvm lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n LogVol00 VolGroup00
Update on this. The manual installation above was using the a non-Sun hard drive (120GB's). When we reverted to the 250GB drive provided by Sun the manual setup of LVM and partitions did not work. It resulted in mkfs.ext3 hanging and SCSI errors once again showing up in dmesg. The drive would be "disabled" and not show up on the system again until it was re-seated. We found the solution to the problem to be disabling LBA on the drive during installation. With LBA disabled, the installation works perfectly -- even in fully automated mode from anaconda. However, after the installation the system does not boot and can't find Grub. The solution at this point is to _reenable_ LBA. Then the system boots fine.
This Bugzilla has been reviewed by Red Hat and is not planned on being addressed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and therefore is being closed. If this bug is critical to production systems, please contact your Red Hat support representative and provide a sufficient business justification in order to re-open it.