James G. Sack (jim) wrote: > Tracy R Reed wrote: >> I've been working this problem off and on for a month and decided that >> since some of you use VIA Epia motherboards you might have seen >> something like this before. >> >> When I use our standard kickstart config or do a manual install and >> specify that / and /boot is on a mirror'd volume and /home and the rest >> are on a mirrored LVM volume I get this error: >> >> An error occurred trying to format sysvg/home. This problem is serious, >> and the install cannot continue. >> >> Press <Enter> 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 parameterized >> function 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. >> >> This machine has a 1Ghz Nehemia CPU from VIA and a VIA mobo. It has 256M >> 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. >> >> RedHat has looked into this and used our kickstart config in a virtual >> machine machine with 256M of RAM and 2 80G disks and the install worked >> perfectly. So I'm guessing it has something to do with the hardware. >> >> Anyone interested in all of the details can read the notes from our >> RedHat support ticket which I have pasted here: >> >> http://pastebin.ca/927325 >> >> Any ideas why I would be getting this strange error? I'm rather bummed >> that even RedHat hasn't been able to figure this out in a month. If I >> don't get this sorted in the next few days I am just going to set up the >> machines without RAID. The plan is to run the two of them in HA mode >> anyway. Was just hoping to have the extra protection. >> > > I wonder if it's possible to run anaconda under a debugger? > > I've been finding winpdb quite nice, but plain old pydb is I guess a > bunch better than nothing! > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda says: > """ > .. anaconda provides advanced debugging features such as remote logging, > access to the python interactive debugger, and remote saving of > exception dumps. > """ > > ask RH how to get into that interactive debugger? >
Just as a sanity check, it is possible to retry the same kickstart on another IDE-MoBo, and maybe with same/more RAM? Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
