SUSE 10 Fail to reboot on initial install, hang on boot.local

derrickhackman · 12-05-2005, 08:07 AM

I am installing SUSE 10 on a fresh IBM 266 tower server that has 2 ULTRA SCSI 360 drives a single 2.8 GHz processor and a gig of RAM. I execute a minimal (text-only) installation for this machine and set up the 2 drives in a RAID 1 mirror configuration. Upon the initial reboot of the machine (this is the automatic reboot initiated by the installation routine) the machine hangs at:

Quote:

System Boot Control: Running /etc/init.d/boot.local

I have tried the failsafe boot as well as other installation configurations. It appears I cannot get past the initial boot.

Your help is appreciated.

BTW, I have been using SUSE since the SUSE 9 version and never had any issues.

abisko00 · 12-07-2005, 04:19 AM

Strange!
It's not necessarily a problem with boot.local, since the bootscripts are being run in parallel.
The only possibility I can think of, is to boot from a LiveCD and have a closer look at the logfiles (/var/log/boot.msg and /var/log/messages).
Does the system hang completely, or can you switch with Alt+F10 to the kernel messages?

derrickhackman · 12-07-2005, 05:59 AM

Here is what I have found:

I installed SuSE 9.0 Professional with a RAID 1 with the partitions as:
1GB /swap on hda as swap
1GB /swap on hdb as swap
100MB /boot on hda as RAID
100MB /boot on hdb as RAID
(balance of drive space) as / on hda as RAID
(balance of drive space) as / on hdb as RAID

Made /boot part of RAID1 and made / as part of RAID1.

The install with SuSE 9.0 Professional completed fine... no issues. I then took the SuSE 10 disks and did an upgrade to the SuSE 9 install and eveything looked goot until it got to the the 'boot.local' message. At this point it sounded as if the drives just shut off and the machine went into a black hole.

There has to be something with SuSE 10 and disk management or otherwise that SuSE 9 does not care about or rather SuSE 10 manages a different way.

I don't think the 5 CDs nor DVD has a bootable disk with it so I imagine I will need to download from the Novell site.

Thoughts?

By the way, the upgrade from SuSE 9 to 10 was only done as me trying to implement a workaround for SuSE 10 not installing directly. It seems no matter they way I install the OS I cannot get SuSE 10 on the box.

rnturn · 12-07-2005, 06:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by derrickhackman

I don't think the 5 CDs nor DVD has a bootable disk with it so I imagine I will need to download from the Novell site.

The first CD should be bootable as should be the DVD. In fact, I thought all of the CDs were bootable (just so they can display a message that you should have booted from CD1).

Were these downloaded or retail discs?

derrickhackman · 12-07-2005, 06:38 PM

Retail ... I like to pay the nominal fee to support Linux.

Perhaps I need to check the disk to be sure. You are probably right but in my fit of frustration I missed it.

rnturn · 12-09-2005, 02:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by derrickhackman

Retail ... I like to pay the nominal fee to support Linux.

That's the way I felt when I used to buy the RH retail editions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by derrickhackman

Perhaps I need to check the disk to be sure.

I know the first CD is bootable because I mistakenly tried installing from the CDs on an AMD64 system and it griped at me about attempting to install a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware. I'm not entirely sure about CDs 2 through 5.

derrickhackman · 12-09-2005, 05:42 PM

I booted it off disk 1 and read boot.msg and did not find any issues. I then did a restart and used [alt+F10] and found that it was complaining on eth1 (a GB NIC). I pulled the NIC and did the install to completion. Seems the NIC had a hardware failure. Amazing.

Thanks for all your help; much appreciated!... Now I am off to get another NIC.