Hi all,

Any help or advice more than welcome, I have been trying to do some testing with server cloning and partitioning and hit some walls.

The server is question is a Dell PowerEdge 2950 and the Distro's I have tried are :-

Clonezilla-live-1.2.8-46-i686
Parted Magic 6.2 & 6.2

The problem is a little strange is that the console appears to keep reporting either unreadable sectors on sr0 for clonezilla till SQUASHFS fails to load/locate and it panic's

or in the case of Parted Magic..
copying files to RAM ..cp: read error: Input/output error

Mounting pmagic-6.2.sqfs... mount: wrong fstype, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

Mounting //sqfs_disk/pmagic-6.2.sqfs failed.

type "exit" to reboot the computer

bash-4.1#

Now the only problem here is I can't check the log's or dmesg the thing because it freezes the KVM and as I am offsite I have no spares with me

Parted Magic does boot on a number of other servers like the R900 but will not boot at all here, I have tried safemode and disabling various other flag's but I must be missing something. - Any advice welcomed as I only have tomorrow to make this work before I am offsite again.

I can't answer why what you've tried doesn't work. However, I can tell you that RHEL5 works just fine on Dell PE 2950s.

Specs on system may help a bit.

The cd drive could be bad or slightly off.

Try to use black cd-r's and burn a distro at the very slowest speed you can. Just because the disk works one some other computer doesn't mean this one likes it.

Try to boot to usb cd-drive if supported too on a known good usb cd drive.



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I assume you mean the original complaint?

"Now the only problem here is I can't check the log's or dmesg the thing because it freezes the KVM and as I am offsite I have no spares with me"

By the way all the 2950s I run have the Dell PERC card (5/i) for SAS drives to allow hardware RAID. This requires use of the megaraid_sas driver in kernel. RHEL5 uses that automatically but I'm wondering if your tools distros do. You might want to look at how to specify megaraid_sas at boot if you're using the PERC card as well. (You should see the PERC during the initial POST of system.)