Sounder 8 installation notes

[James Gregory]

The machine in question was originally setup to be a "media
workstation". It has an NVIDIA GeForce 5200 something card (it's a dual
head card but currently has only one monitor), 2 sound cards (one on the
motherboard and a PCI card), 2 160GB SATA hard drives that are connected
to one of those dodgy "hardware" RAID controllers that aren't really.
The drives are configured with some RAID 1 partitions and a RAID 0
partition on the end of the disk which was intended for video files but
has ended up just being a dumping ground of unimportant stuff. There's
some type of BT878 TV tuner card which I use pretty regularly for
watching TV directly and also for streaming TV to my laptop with VLC.
There's also a USB MIDI controller widget, but that's currently not
plugged in.

The machine currently has Fedora Core 2 and Windows XP installed. FC2 is
done on RAID across several partitions and XP is on /dev/hde1.

I want it to install on /dev/hdg1. It has booted up and presented me
with a menu with "Erase entire disk: ..." selected as the default. It
scared the shit outta me, I imagine it would worry a newbie too (and how
often do people want to obliterate their whole drive? It seems like it's
only a sensible default for an empty hard drive).

I chose manual partitioning and managed to setup a partition for / in
the location I wanted it. I then wanted to tell it to talk to the
existing RAID 1 swap partition. I couldn't see a way to do this, since
the manual partitioner seemed blissfully unaware that a bunch of my
partitions were RAID.

I chose XFS as the partition type and it worked ok, but I got a rather
unfriendly warning about how XFS was likely to not work and that I
probably needed a boot partition. The partition in question was the
first one on the disk and it was a 32GB partition. I was pretty sure it
would boot ok, so I let it use the unrecommended partition type (why
isn't XFS recommended? It's great).

Curiously it decided that it would use my swap partitions from the other
OS on the system. I was ok with this but surprised; I had to do
something to give it a / partition and I wanted to setup swap post
install (along with RAID). It still appears to be unaware that the
partition it is working on is actually part of a RAID1 setup.

When it came time to install a boot-loader I told it to put it on
/dev/hdg1 (the root partition from my install) partly because I figured
that would be the least disruption, but also because I wasn't sure which
drives hd0, hd1 would refer to (there are two other hard drives in the
machine, hda and hdc IIRC. They are not currently used, but I don't
recall seeing them in the partitioner so I ultimately didn't know where
the drive numbering started from). It then proclaimed that it was
running "grub-install /dev/hdg1". I let it sit there for quite a while.
Asked about this on #ubuntu whilst waiting and was told to kill the grub
process. Did so and it finished installing grub.

After it rebooted, my machine went back to the Fedora boot process that
was previously setup. I addded a lilo entry there to boot from
/dev/hdg1.  Curiously, when I chose that option it booted me into
windows XP (the other, other operating system on this box). I thought
that perhaps the drive letters had been swapped for some reason but
booting into the 'windows' option from outer-lilo also booted me to
winxp. I then booted Fedora again and tried to mount /dev/hdg1. No go.
Lessing both /dev/hde1 and /dev/hdg1 shows an NT boot loader on hde1 and
GRUB on hdg1. I have the sinking suspicion at this point that installing
GRUB has destroyed the XFS partition.

Said suspicion was later confirmed by the illustrious Jamie Wilkinson.
It would probably be helpful for the installer to have a big whinge if
you try to install GRUB onto a partition you asked it to format in the
partitioning stage. Especially since Windows operates just fine with a
boot loader on the same partition as the OS itself.

I now need to figure where I can install a boot-loader and try again.
Will write again once I get that done. If anyone has some good ideas
about a way to setup Ubuntu alongside two other OSes, mail me off-list.

Overall: In recent memory I've used the Fedora installer, the Mandrake
installer and the Windows XP installer. Mandrake in particular was quite
good with dual booting issues. It is also quite good at preventing me
from shooting myself in the foot. Fedora's RAID support was magical. My
experimentation suggests that the Ubuntu installer is quite good if
Ubuntu is to be the only OS on the machine, but I'd be seriously worried
about giving an Ubuntu CD to someone who already has an OS on their
computer. Having the install fail is bad, but recoverable. I really
think the stage that suggests deleting everything needs more advice that
deleting everything really is deleting everything. It looks exactly like
any other dialog that people would happily ignore every day. The boot
loader problem shouldn't have been possible, but I admit that it was a
highly unusual setup and probably not worth devoting time to at this
stage.

James.

-- 
James Gregory <james at james.id.au>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/attachments/20040909/f7ea9680/attachment.pgp