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

[Mark Kirkwood]

Mark Kirkwood wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>   

No, it didn't, but seeing what was happening with more verbose boot 
messages (i.e removing quiet), prompted me to be much more aggressive 
with the rootdelay kernel line option (rootdelay=300) - so my command 
line looks like:

$ cat /proc/cmdline
root=/dev/mapper/pdc_bcfcjihecj3 ro vga=791 rootdelay=300

Now, that was too high, but allowed a boot without any problems. So we 
are sorted (for hardware raid anyway). I might go back and try software 
raid now I have more idea what the problem was!

regards

Mark