[BlueOnyx:13552] Re: Crashed drive

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Chuck,

> Have you seen that one before Michael??

Not in relation with a kernel panic, no. But I've been trying to build
new ISO images of BlueOnyx for about a week now and am hitting a similar
problem.

5107R? No issue. Built just fine and the resulting ISO installs BlueOnyx
perfectly. The installed OS also boots without a hitch.

5108R? World of pain. Revisor builds me a first stage kernel and initrd
which are incomplete and pretty much all the kernel modules are missing.
So on bootup from CD it's even missing the kernel modules for the CD-ROM
and promptly buggers out. If I replace /isolinux/initrd and
/isolinux/vmlinuz on the CD with the ones from the last good CD, it
boots and installs. But afterwards the resulting installed OS won't boot.

Here - again - the discrepancy is /etc/grub.conf vs /boot/grub/grub.conf.

The Anaconda installer on 5108R modifies /etc/grub.conf with the correct
boot information. But not /boot/grub/grub.conf, which is where the Grub
boot loader actually looks for grub.conf. So I manually have to fix this
in a post install script.

It gets a bit more complicated, though: The Anaconda installer
automatically adds provisions to grub.conf to connect the terminal to
the serial port for debugging and troubleshooting. It always did that
and it's generally fine. Unless you attempt to install on a box that has
no serial ports. In which case the box refuses to boot, too. Which is a
surprising and new behavior. As far as I recall the absence of a serial
port wasn't a show stopping event with previous kernels, but I could be
wrong on that.

So I have to remove the terminal/serial port provisions from grub.conf
via cat & grep and have to write a fixed grub.conf via the post install
script. Which I'm currently struggling with, as the system at that point
complains about not finding the "cat" command. Testing this is a two
hour effort each time around (as I have to roll up a new CD each time I
fix the post installer) and I'm going through attempt #25 at the moment.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber