[ILUG] Xen, Debian on DELL PowerEdge 2850[Scanned]

[Tor Bendiksen]

On Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:56:25 +0100, "Cormac McClean" <cormac.mcclean at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
Hi,

> However, I am running into serious problems, which I believe are due to
> the SATA hard drives in the DELL.
> For example, the standard Debian install iso will not work - it doesn't
> recognise the hard drives.
> I have had to use custom built isos (e.g. from
> http://blog.blackdown.de/2005/06/26/debian-installer-with-kernel-2611/)
> to install a basic Debian system.
This does not seem to be the issue here, but I thought I'd mention that I've 
had quite some issues with xen and md-raid and LVM (with xen binaries mostly).
Not the issue here, and it's certainly doable, but a PITA in general.

> I have built a xen-patched kernel (as described in
> http://julien.danjou.info/xen.html) configured to include SCSI_SATA and
> SCSI_ATA_PIIX (which Googling has led me to believe might solve the
> problem), and added the appropriate lines to my grub/menu.lst:
> title Xen 3.0 / XenLinux 2.6
> kernel /boot/xen-3.0-i386.gz
> module /boot/xenu-linux-2.6.16.19-xen root=/dev/sda1 ro
This seems to be your problem. You will probably need a initrd (Initial Ramdisk).

This is particular an issue with SCSI/SATA drives. 

Create one youself either through the debian kernel tools or the mkinitrd package.
 
> However, when I reboot into the Xen system (dom0), I get a Kernel Panic
> with a message saying that hd0,0 or /dev/sda1 is not a valid device. The
> machine reboots immediately before I get a chance to investigate further.
Yupp. Sounds like you need an module /boot/some-initrd-file in your grub menu.lst


> I'd prefer not to have to go back to UML.
Indeed.

 
> Thanks in advance,
> Cormac.
Hope this helps. Best of luck.


Regards, 
-- 
Tor Bendiksen