Hi Folks.

I'm troubleshooting an installation of RHEL 6 on a Dell Precision 370 desktop.

On boot the Dell screen appears, then proceeds to "booting in 4...3..." etc. The RHEL 6 screen appears with the spinning circle thing, then I get a Kernel panic. ("Kernel panic -- not syncing: Attempted to kill init! panic occurred, switching back to text console").

I've tried booting older kernels, and also booting into runlevel 1.

The interesting thing that I noticed is that when it panics the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights start blinking.

I opened up the box and the video card is hot to the touch and the fan on it is stuck (I can sort of turn it by hand). I pulled each of the RAM modules, which didn't change anything.

Do those blinking lights on the keyboard indicate that there is a problem with some part of the hardware and not the RHEL install? (And yes, I Googled around to see if that's the case, and I'm pretty sure that it is, but I thought I'd ask here just to make sure, since I find it odd that the whole shebang doesn't give up sooner than it does--I would have thought a hardware issue would have manifested itself before the OS started booting..... )

Anyway. Thanks for any suggestions!

G.--

I booted from a rescue CD and looked in /var/log and of course found little helpful information.

I rebooted removing "quiet" from the grub arguments and it looks like before the kernel panic that it has problems locating the boot drive--it looks like dracut is trying to generate a software RAID from the two SATA drives that are installed in the machine.

However, the two SATA drives are part of a hardware RAID 1 configuration that I'm looking at right now in the Intel/Dell configuration window, and both drives appear to be okay, and their RAID set-up (that has not been modified) appears to be correct as well.

If that's the case, shouldn't RHEL simply see it as one drive (isn't that the whole point of hardware RAID?)

So if for some reason RHEL can see it as two drives, I can maybe understand the confusion.

Or am I the one who is confused?

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Red Hat> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

The Dell Precision 370's motherboard integrated RAID is not Hardware RAID. It's Intel's firmware integrated software RAID. These type of RAID only works in Windows since they are driver dependent. I'm pretty sure RHEL5 does not support these, that's why you see 2 drives instead of 1.

There is no real advantage in using these on Linux, turn them off by using the <ctrl>+i utility to reset the drives to non-RAID, then turn off RAID in the BIOS SATA Operations page.
If you want RAID but don't wanna buy any hardware, I suggest you go with Linux Software RAID.

If you really want hardware RAID. Get yourself a RAID controller card from Dell. Here's a list of their hardware RAID cards:
- SAS6/iR
- PERC6/iR
- PERC H200
- PERC H700

You really should replace that video card with the stuck fan. Without cooling, they're liable to meltdown at any time.

Thanks so much for your reply.

I was able to boot into a rescue CD and several hours ago started copying all of the data (several hundred gigs) on the drive(s) over to a different set of hard drives (on my Mac, heh).

Thanks for the explanation about the software/hardware RAID. I was curious as to why the OS kept trying to act like it was seeing separate drives when from what I understand a hardware RAID would truly only show the single device to the OS.

This machine is old enough that we're going to retire it once the data transfer is over and we can set things up with a newer machine.

Thanks again so much for a response.

Moderators--this thread can be closed. :-)

G.--