Install of Ubuntu 8.10 server unbootable (a measure of progress)

[Mark Kirkwood]

Mark Kirkwood wrote:
> I've decided to try out Ubuntu 8.10 server on an older machine I have 
> here. It is a Supermicro P3TDER with a Promise TX4000 raid adapter.
>
> I had previously had a different flavour of Linux installed on it with 
> several raid arrays created via mdadm. I thought I would leave these as 
> is, and install Ubuntu into them (i.e. format them as use them for 
> /boot, /, /usr, /var  ...)
>
> While the install itself went fine, the system will not reboot. I get a 
> message saying that md2 (/dev/md2 - the would be root) does not exist 
> and then the busybox prompt. Attempting a  boot in rescue mode goes a 
> little further but says that all the arrays are "stopped". I've tried 
> experimenting with "rootdelay" in the grub config, but to no avail. It 
> looks as tho I have RAID and Promise SATA loaded (looking at /proc/modules).
>
> I figured that I may have corrupted the arrays somehow, so I booted from 
> the cd, and picked "rescue broken installation", and from there "create 
> a shell on root" - and chose /dev/md2 as root. This works fine, I can 
> mount all the other filesystems successfully as well.
>
> I have /boot as ext3 but everything else is xfs.
>
>
> Any suggestions?
>
>
>   
In fact I do have a few suggestions... :-)

Since the nice installer seems to know about drivers for the TX4000 card 
I decided to try Promise firmware RAID - with the same result - busybox 
prompt. Oh dear. However, exiting out of busybox resulted in the boot 
continuing (seemingly) normally.

Hmmm - I tried removing 'splash' and 'quiet' from the kernel command 
line, and this gets things a bit further... looks to be hanging 
detecting/probing the CDROM drive now.

So, at least I've managed to boot the beast! I'll update everything to 
the latest version, and see if that helps.

Cheers

Mark