Archive for September, 2005

Debian 3.1 on a HP Proliant DL140

Sunday, September 25th, 2005

Installing Debian 3.1 (aka sarge) on a brand new HP Proliant DL140 1U server proved to be pretty complicated, mostly due to issues with the SATA drive.

Installing from a temporarily connected CDROM drive worked (no internal optical drive in the DL140, just space for a slimline drive), but after I removed the drive and rebooted I got a “kernel panic” message. Seems like Grub didn’t enumerate the drives in the same way as when the CDROM was connected.

A known problem with the Debian installer also made installing from CD difficult – the CDROM drive and the SATA disc became mutually exclusive! The solution was NOT to load the ata_piix and piix modules until needed.

My next approach was PXE booting (installing from the network without physical install media) the machine. The easiest way to get that running was ironically to use a Windows-based TFTP server (tftpd32) and then configure the DHCP server (dnsmasq). Booting off PXE worked, but the install image didn’t seem to contain the required SATA drivers, so the installer never found the SATA drive.

I managed to do a successful install using kernel 2.4.27 instead of 2.6.8, but upgrading the kernel to 2.6.8 after installing made the system unbootable again (kernel panic). I wasn’t satisified with using 2.4 and decided to try another way that didn’t require a time-consuming (well, for me anyway!) manual kernel recompilation…

The final solution was to create a bootable USB stick with Debian installer on it and install from it… Using “expert26″ I disabled the piix modules and voilá – the installer found my SATA drive!

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Posted in Debian, Linux | No Comments »

Cloning a soon-to-crash hard drive

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

When my PC at work (an 8 months old HP) started making loud clicking sounds, I realized that I needed to act quickly and replace the disk. The replacement drive arrived the next day, but the troubles started once I tried to clone the old drive to the new one.

First, a warning. Be careful when using Norton Ghost (in my case version 2003) on a HP machine – there’s a known problem with that combination.

In my case, I ran Ghost and chose to clone the drive. When the computer booted into the Ghost interface, it locked up and displayed an error message saying “internal stack overflow”. After retrying this a few times (same results) and trying to boot back into Windows (didn’t work since Ghost had taken over the boot sector) I booted Knoppix so I could look for assistance on the web.

(Thank god for Knoppix, BTW… I was able to access my files and documents on the disk, access the net and use email just as usual. It only took a quick configuration of Thunderbird to get myself back on track.)

Further attempts to clone the drive from within Knoppix failed – PartEd crashed when I selected the drive and both PartImage and NTFSclone gave up midway due to disk errors.

Finally I managed to remove the small partition created by Ghost and make the old Windows partition active again, and Windows on the faulty drive booted again. Well, after a few lockups during boottime anyway.

Now it was time for another try at cloning the drive… I decided to give Acronis True Image a try, and it worked beautifully.

So the lesson is – don’t use Ghost unless you’re sure it’s compatible with your hardware, because it can really screw up your computer…

Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, Linux, Windows | 4 Comments »