I am having a bit of difficulty getting KnoppMyth installed and booting. I've got a motherboard out of a Sony machine (P4 processor but I don't know who makes the motherboard) with a 3ware Escalade 9500s SATA raid controller on it (in one of the ide slots). To the raid controller are connected 4 500gb SATA drives, in raid 5 configuration (for a total array size of 1.5tb).

Using a KnoppMythR5E50.iso install CD (tested OK from within the KnoppMyth installer), I'm able to proceed smoothly through all the installation steps. The array is properly detected as a single, large scsi device, and the installer seems to properly create the partitions and install KnoppMyth.

At the first reboot, however, I run into a problem. I get this:

LILO 22.6.1 Loading Linux ..........................
BIOS data check successful

And then the screen blanks momentarily and fills with this error message, repeated thousands of times:

Suspend2 2.2.8.4: Missing or invalid storage location (resume2= parameter). Please correct and rerun lilo (or equivalent) before suspending.

Those messages come one after another, flooding the screen for a minute or so, finally terminating with the following messages:

/linuxrc: out of file descriptors
/etc/init: out of file descriptors
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!


I've tried the auto-install a few times, as well as the manual install, and I run into the same problem each time. rdt at #knoppmyth has tried to help me but we haven't had much luck yet. Does anyone have any ideas what I might be doing wrong? Thank you in advance.

Kris

Thanks for writing this up. Maybe someone here can help better than I did.

I have a 3ware 9590SE-8ML and on earlier versions of knoppmyth I had to recompile the kernal with the 3ware drive in it. Otherwise I would get kernal panic's. Knoppmyth had the drive already there it was just not in the kernal. Give that a try and see if it works. I have not tried to load the newest version yet. Let me know if you don't know how and I can send you my instructions.

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

I cant help you with the SATA issue but I can say you can safely ignore the suspend message, my machine says that as well and it is stable as a stone. If it bugs you, you can remove that portion from /etc/lilo.conf and rerun lilo. If you're not usin gthe suspend feature, it doesnt pertain to you...

The Ether...

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Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU

Thank you so much Marty!

I'd love to try compiling the kernel and your notes would be really helpful. I've done a compile a few times but I'm rarely successful without some guidance.

On my system I assume the kernel (and the rest of KnoppMyth) has been installed correctly because I got the "Loading Linux .............." bit. So generally speaking, in order to compile a new kernel, I'll boot from the install CD to get to a console, mount sda1, and then go about compiling the kernel there?

Thank you again for the response. I was a bit stuck but I'm excited now to have something to try!

Kris

Thank you for the tip, ethernut! Is it really okay to get *so many* of that suspend2 error messages? I mean, it floods the screen for at least 60 seconds, so there must be thousands of that error again and again...

Well that aint normal and no you shuoldn't be getting that many, I guess what I was trying to say was, if you're Googling that suspend error trying to find an answer to your SATA problem, don't waste your time. They are unrelated.

Can you use a boot CD like Knoppix to get in an poke around on your drive? Does the data appear to be intact?

As a work around I might be tempted to add an elcheapo 10 Gig drive and do your auto install to it then remount /myth to your massive array.

Another thing I would wonder about is if Lilo is pissed about having such a huge drive. Might go to the dark side and attach a floppy drive then use mkboot to make a boot floppy that may boot your array. This is just temporary ofcourse, if you plan on leaving the box on 24/7 you wouldn't need it much.

Just a few thoughts..

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Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU

You can ignore the suspend2 messages. It has been a long day and I'm not in front of a system...

You'll want to boot off the CD and quit.
mount -o rw /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
chroot /mnt/hda1
cd boot
mkdir tmp
gunzip initrd.gz
mount -o loop initrd tmp
cd tmp
vi linuxrc
You may or may not see some modprobe lines in there.... Add
modprobe 3mware (or whatever the module name is)
write and quit
cp /path/to/3mware.ko modules/
cd ..
umount tmp
gzip initrd
lilo -v
exit
reboot

Just off the top of my head... Hope this helps.

I was about to post my instructions but I see cecil has posted some for you. Can't get better then getting them from the man himself. It was a little different them mine but the same idea. Let me know if you want mine but I would start with his.

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

ethernut, great idea installing on another drive. I've got a drive right here that I can use, and with the hw raid on a pci slot, I've got plenty of bandwith on the ide channels. I'll give it a shot!

And I now know to consider the suspend2 messages as a separate issue. Thanks for the clear explanation.

Thank you cecil! I'm trying out installing on another ide drive at the moment and if that doesn't work, I'm going to try the compile.

You probably already know this but I just realized that KnoppMyth wants the HD on hda, and not hdc. Although the initial stages of the installer seem to recognize the drive when it's hdc (for example, when I have both that drive and the raid array connected, I can properly choose "hdc" from the list of possible install locations), when I go for the actual install, it gives an error about not being able to format the drive. Took me a few moments to realize what was going on but when I switched the drive to the other ide port so that it's hda, all was well.

I'll post more in a moment about how the single-drive install goes.

Per ethernut's suggestion, I installed a single drive connected to ide and then installed KnoppMyth there. It seems to have worked very well! No kernel panic at reboot. And even the suspend2 error message is improved - I now only get the error a single time, as opposed to thousands of times.

As of Dec 29, 2006 it seems a bit difficult to install KnoppMyth on this hardware raid (3ware Escalade 9500s) device at the moment. From what others have suggested, it sounds like the necessary module is not included in the KnoppMyth kernel, so a recompile might do the trick. In my case, having KnoppMyth on a separate drive from the array storage device is actually a cleaner solution for what I'm doing so I'll try a few more things out this way.

But if cecil or any of the other maintainers would like me to try to get things working on the raid device for the purposes of debugging, please let me know. I'm happy to do whatever I can to be of help.

Dale, ethernut, Marty, cecil: Thank you so very much for all advice! You all are a testament to the supportive community that is Free Software. Count me on the list of MythTV supporters and please contact me if there's anything I can do to help. I'm an English major so perhaps I could work on doc revision somewhere or something... Thank you!

Xuxa, I'm glad it worked. My solution was more of a work around as Cecils was much more elegant. Forgive me for asking however, were you able to get /myth mounted to your array?

Oh and I'm an American, so please forgive my bad english. *couldn't help it*

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Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU

Aargh! I'm afraid I spoke too soon. With KnoppMyth installed to a single IDE drive, the machine boots properly and KnoppMyth works well. But the machine still hangs at boot time when I connect the raid array. The pages and pages of suspend2 errors are back.

I think the trick will be the kernel compile cecil recommended. I'm going to try that next...

Cecils was not a kernel recompile but a method to inject the SATA Array driver into the boot process so it would be available/able to boot.

Fire up Knoppmyth on the small HD (running R5E50) without the RAID array mounted. Then try to mount theRAID array, what happens? What kernel module loads when the RAID array is mounted?

Boot up, umount /myth (which should be /dev/hda3 on your small HD). You may have to do an "init "1 to do it as the filesystem may be busy.

Do an fdisk -l , do you see the array?

Then mount /dev/[raidarray] to /myth.

What happens?

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Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU