cannot install lenny amd64 on 2950

[ronreg at mtholyoke.edu]

It's too late today to continue working on this, but I may have a clue:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=463123

I need to pop a USB stick in to load the broadcom firmware bits during
install.  That means Lenny gets the sd_ numbering shifted, and I need to
boot w/ Knoppix to edit fstab and grub's menu.lst.  No problem.

But my Knoppix's grub can't deal w/ ext3 having 256 byte inodes.  I
think this is my problem.  Hopefully I can iron this out tomorrow.

-Ron-

2009-02-18_11:13:28-0500 ronreg at mtholyoke.edu:
> Lenny i386 isn't working either.  Install appears to complete OK, but
> the bootloader never starts on reboot.  Again, running grub manually
> from Knoppix is no help - grub can't find the disk.
> 
> I'm going to try zeroing the disk (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda) using
> Knoppix.
> 
> -Ron-
> 
> 2009-02-18_08:43:55-0500 ronreg at mtholyoke.edu:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I am trying to install the amd64 version of Debian Lenny 5.0 on a
> > Poweredge 2950.  It appears that neither the grub nor lilo boot loaders
> > will install properly.  I am using a PERC 5/i controller, w/ a RAID 1 OS
> > partition over two 146GB SAS disks.  I also have a RAID 10 partition
> > over 4 1TB SATA disks, if that makes any difference.
> > 
> > My controller is running DELL's latest firmware (as of this date).  I've
> > tried using Knoppix to install grub on the mbr manually, but grub can't
> > find the disks.  I.e., if I run grub, and do 'root (hd0), find
> > /grub/stage1', it cannot (I have a /boot partition on (hd0)).
> > Otherwise, the install does complete.  The partitions I specified are
> > properly created, and contain the data that they should.  It's just the
> > boot loaders that are giving me problems.
> > 
> > Because grub is never able to identify the disk, I'm suspecting the
> > problem lies with the Perc 5/i bios, but I'd be happy to be disabused of
> > that notion.
> > 
> > I'm going to try the i386 version of Lenny next, but that is not where
> > I'd like to end up.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Ron Peterson
> > Network & Systems Manager
> > Mount Holyoke College
> > http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~rpeterso
> > -
> > I wish my computer would do what I want it to do - not what I tell it to do.
> > 
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