13-FEB-2008 14:22:33 It Department These are 80G disks. Yes, I am using two disks trying to mirror them and having this error. I can install on separate disks without mirroring them just fine. 13-FEB-2008 14:22:33 It Department Status changes from "Waiting on Customer" to "Waiting on Red Hat". 04-FEB-2008 10:47:07 Brier, John Robert Status changes from "Waiting on Red Hat" to "Waiting on Customer". 04-FEB-2008 10:42:10 Brier, John Robert What size are these disks? Also, just to confirm you are using two disks and having this error right? John Brier, RHCE 01-FEB-2008 18:05:31 Brier, John Robert Chris was out Thursday and today. I have taken over this but was not able to find anything to resolve this issue yet. I will get back to you Monday. John Brier, RHCE 31-JAN-2008 16:59:02 It Department This issue going on its third day. Any ideas? 30-JAN-2008 02:05:49 It Department I replaced my partitioning/mirroring/lvm setup with the code above which I uncommented. It created the filesystems and installed the OS just fine. I have also tried various configurations and it seems any time there is mirroring involved it fails. 30-JAN-2008 02:05:49 It Department Status changes from "Waiting on Customer" to "Waiting on Red Hat". 29-JAN-2008 17:27:32 Cardwell, Christopher John Status changes from "Waiting on Red Hat" to "Waiting on Customer". 29-JAN-2008 17:23:48 Cardwell, Christopher John Can you try uncommenting the following: #clearpart --linux --drives=hda,hdb #part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=hda #part pv.20 --size=0 --grow --ondisk=hdb #part pv.19 --size=0 --grow --ondisk=hda #volgroup VolGroup00 --pesize=32768 pv.20 pv.19 #logvol swap --fstype swap --name=LogVol01 --vgname=VolGroup00 --size=224 --grow --maxsize=448 #logvol / --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol00 --vgname=VolGroup00 --size=1024 --grow We are doing this to make sure that the stuff is working or not. Regards, Chris Cardwell - RHCE 29-JAN-2008 16:20:37 Cardwell, Christopher John Customer called back in looking for an update. I informed him I was still looking thru the information in the ticket and would pass this to the next region if I was unable to find anything. 29-JAN-2008 16:09:34 It Department The motherboard in this thing is a VIA EPIA PE10000G 29-JAN-2008 15:25:53 It Department I have attached the anaconda-ks.cfg file from the root directory from the manual install. Not sure what you will learn from it though as I just took the defaults. The partitioning/lv scheme in it is nothing like what I set up. 29-JAN-2008 15:25:53 It Department File anaconda-ks.cfg attached 29-JAN-2008 15:25:53 It Department Status changes from "Waiting on Customer" to "Waiting on Red Hat". 28-JAN-2008 18:46:21 Nwosu, Uzoma Chikezie Status changes from "Waiting on Red Hat" to "Waiting on Customer". 28-JAN-2008 18:43:42 Nwosu, Uzoma Chikezie This is good news. Let's now get the anaconda-ks.cfg file from root and attach it to this ticket. This should allow us to compare kickstarts and make corrects in your main file. Regards, Uzoma Nwosu, RHCE 28-JAN-2008 18:37:11 It Department I just did a manual install (no kickstart but still pxe booted) and chose all of the defaults with the default partitioning scheme and it is now installing packages so it seems to have worked. But it did not do any mirroring. 28-JAN-2008 18:23:04 It Department I just noticed that these machines have only 256M of RAM. They are designed to be firewall appliances so fairly minimal spec. I have a feeling that is on the low end for RHEL. Could that be somehow causing this problem? 28-JAN-2008 17:46:48 It Department It creates md3, not clean, doing background reconstruction, cat /proc/mdstat shows md3 under construction and it has hdb5 and hda5. I have two identical systems and they are both exhibiting this problem. So it seems unlikely that md3 is hitting some sort of disk error partway through the mirror sync. So far only two lines relating to hda5 and hdb5 in dmesg: <6>hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 > <6>md: bind <6>md: could not bd_claim hda5 <6>md: unbind <6>md: export_rdev(hda5) hdb has the same output except it does not have the "could not bd_claim" line. hda5 and hdb5 are both extended partitions. I don't know if that is significant. 28-JAN-2008 17:34:22 It Department An install is running now and it is calculating dependencies. On f2 I can see that md3 exists and is syncing. md2 is delayed pending md3 since they are on the same physical disk. lvm vgdisplay shows sysvg exists lvm lvdisplay shows home usr var lv's exist lvm pvmdisplay shows /dev/md3 On vc f4 I see: <3>md: could not bd_claim hda3 <4>md: autostart failed! This looks suspicious to me. hda3 is part of md2 which is delayed. After that it adds swap on md2 md0 and md1 do not exist while the installer says it is "checking dependencies in packages selected for installation" When it finishes checking the deps it says: could not bd_claim hda2 hda2 autostart failed! could not bd_claim hda2 hda1 autostart failed! it finishes syncing md1 and md2 with 2 out of 2 mirrors active. md3 has disappeared. So perhaps this is an md problem? I am re-running the install and watching for anything to do with md3 this time... 28-JAN-2008 17:15:56 It Department File ks.cfg.i386 attached 28-JAN-2008 17:15:55 It Department When doing a kickstart install using the attached file we get the following error: An error occurred trying to format sysvg/home. This problem is serious, and the install cannot continue. Press to reboot your system. If I flip over to virtual console f3 I can see that it has successfully formatted / and /boot and then tried to format /home It shows the format command (all assembled, not in the argument format as displayed on screen which is a pain to type) as: /usr/sbin/mke3fs /dev/sysvg/home -i 4096 -j This kickstart is off of PXE boot and with known good media (we have installed a dozen other machines this way). I went through a manual install after PXE booting the box and replicated our standard partitioning scheme and had the exact same issue. On several occasions while the processor calculates dependencies I have gone to virtual console f2 and ran some commands to check the progress and status of the install. The partitions all get created, the logical volumes all get created, and everything looks good right up until it produces the above error. After that no volume groups are active but sysvg does exist. After the error I can go to f2 and re-activate the volume groups and mkfs and access the filesystems. So I would guess that something is happening to lvm at some point. I see no kernel oopsen, nothing incriminating in dmesg. We are using software RAID. No RAID card. md0, md1, and md2 exist after the error message is displayed but md3 seems to have disappeared. lvm pvdisplay shows nothing but does produce some messages such as "File descriptor 5 left open". Yesterday I was able to manually create the md3 device and initialize it as a physical volume and everything worked. Not sure why the installer is having issues with it. Scrolling up through the output on vc f4 I see that md3 did exist at one point during the install. I did see something about "cannot bd_claim" one of the disks but the console has stopped scrolling for some reason. I have restarted the install to see if I can get more info in that area. I just noticed that the raid5 partitioning section says "This config assumes a two disk mirrored setup". That comment is in error. This kickstart detects 1,2,4 disk setups and does our definition of the "right thing" for each. This machine has a 1Ghz Nehemia CPU from VIA and a VIA mobo. It has 1G of RAM and 2 Maxtor 80G ATA disks. One notable difference between this machine and our usual kickstart is that all of our other stuff is SATA. We did a search and replace on hda with sda etc everywhere to generate this file to install our VIA machines with ATA disks. We have done this with ATA disks before using this same kickstart modified the same way with RHEL4 and had no issue. 28-JAN-2008 17:15:55 It Department Status changes from "Waiting on Customer" to "Waiting on Red Hat". 28-JAN-2008 16:50:08 Cardwell, Christopher John Customer is trying to install from CD or kickstart, but getting errors (which he will be posting in the ticket). He's PXE booting the machines - the kickstart file is via http - his manual install - he did over the network, so he's not doing a true manual install. He's still doing a network install. The servers do not have optical drives. They are custom built machines. He was able to do this with RHEL 4 no problem, but RHEL 5 has problems. I am going to get a kickstart file from him - and see what I can find out. Regards, Chris Cardwell - RHCE