Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 77392
Installation of Linux Redhat 8.0
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:11 EDT
Description of Problem: When you install redhat 8.0 or redhat 7.2 with two hard disk one in hda and the other one in hdc. These two harddisk are identical (IBM 41 GB IC35L040AVVA07-0). The motherboard is a rocky-3702EV-V4. hda is discover as : 2005 cyl / 255 heads / 63 sectors hdc is discover as : 79780 cyl / 16 heads / 63 sectors This is a little problem when you make RAID 1 in soft. If you modify these values by hand with fdisk to makes it identical via redhat interface, these values are not saved. If you modify these values by hand via a tty console these values are correctly saved. When you return via the graphic interface, linux redhat installer find that hdc is not good when you make back and next... The good solution is to find the same number od fectors/head and cylinders in hda and hdc when you have identical disks. when you put these harddisks in hda and hdb, the values are identical. I do the same test on another machine which have the same motherboard and the same hardisks, the problem is the same so it's not a hardware problem. In the bios in autodetect mode, the harddisk are configured identical.
Are the primary and secondary IDE controllers on your system using the same IDE chipset? This appears to be a kernel geometry detection issue.
The website of this motherboard is at : http://www.ieiworld.com/products/sbc/rocky-3702ev.pdf In the file /etc/sysconfig/hwconf, I have these informations : class: OTHER bus: PCI detached: 0 driver: unknown desc: "Intel Corporation|82371AB PIIX4 ISA" vendorId: 8086 deviceId: 7110 subVendorId: 0000 subDeviceId: 0000 pciType: 1 - class: OTHER bus: PCI detached: 0 driver: unknown desc: "Intel Corporation|82371AB PIIX4 IDE" vendorId: 8086 deviceId: 7111 subVendorId: 0000 subDeviceId: 0000 pciType: 1 - class: OTHER bus: PCI detached: 0 driver: sonypi desc: "Intel Corporation|82371AB PIIX4 ACPI" vendorId: 8086 deviceId: 7113 subVendorId: 0000 subDeviceId: 0000 pciType: 1 - class: OTHER bus: PCI detached: 0 driver: unknown desc: "DEC|DECchip 21150" vendorId: 1011 deviceId: 0022 subVendorId: 0000 subDeviceId: 0000 pciType: 1 - class: NETWORK bus: PCI detached: 0 device: eth driver: 8139too desc: "Realtek|RTL-8139" vendorId: 10ec deviceId: 8139 subVendorId: 10ec subDeviceId: 8139 pciType: 1 - class: HD bus: IDE detached: 0 device: hda driver: ignore desc: "IC35L040AVVN07-0" physical: 19710/16/255 logical: 5005/255/63 - class: HD bus: IDE detached: 0 device: hdc driver: ignore desc: "IC35L040AVVN07-0" physical: 19710/16/255 logical: 5005/255/63 - We had forced the logical via the console to have the same on the two harddisks. I hope this will help you a little.
The kernel pulls hda/b info from the CMOS data but cannot do so for hdc/hdd. This can lead to slightly different sizes being apparent for the two disks but that isnt a problem, the raid layer will adjust a mirror appropriately to fit the slightly smaller drive. Using fdisk to set the geometry works. I wonder if the installer simply cached the data.
If this is the case I would suspect parted.