[5537] in Release_7.7_team
Re: AMENDED: Re: stock answer for install problems with Dell gx620
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Heather Anne Harrison)
Mon Jul 17 17:21:26 2006
Message-ID: <20060717172122.fjz6we3cae0wcsko@webmail.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 17:21:22 -0400
From: Heather Anne Harrison <aurora@MIT.EDU>
To: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
Cc: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@mit.edu>, release-team@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <4B3E61DC-9AAB-44A4-9E03-B6DBBC8F70D7@mit.edu>
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Done, unless there's a third set of corrections that arrives as
soon as I hit send. :)
Heather Anne
aurora@mit.edu
Quoting William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>:
> Throw away the suggestion I sent in the previous email. After I sent
> it, I noticed one more thing to change, and decided to propose an
> even more refined set of amendments.
>
> In stock answer 8151 make the following 3 changes:
>
> 1. Delete the sentence:
> The Athena installer will automatically deal with the X problem.
>
> The customers will not see an X problem, so the sentence will just
> confuse them.
>
> 2. Change the question from being about X to being about the disks,
> and include the error message the customers will see:
>
> Q: When I try to install Athena on my Dell GX620, I see the error "No
> hard drives have been found."
>
> 3. Change the answer intro to:
>
> A: The Dell GX620 has a newer SATA interface than what the current
> Athena installer recognizes. You can install Athena if you change
> the BIOS setting to enable "Combination" mode on the SATA controller.
>
> -wdc
>
> On Jul 14, 2006, at 8:13 AM, Heather Anne Harrison wrote:
>
>> Here are the stock answers. Let me know if they need any
>> updates. The information on the actual problem seems a bit
>> scant.
>>
>> http://itinfo.mit.edu/answer.php?id=8150
>> http://itinfo.mit.edu/answer.php?id=8151
>>
>> Heather Anne
>> aurora@mit.edu
>>
>>
>> Quoting "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>:
>>
>>>
>>> [As requested by wdc, here's a basic stock answer for the gx620 install
>>> issues. This should be enough for someone with a minimally pointy hat,
>>> but feel free to flesh it out as desired. Note that there's a faint hope
>>> that the RHEL4 problem will go away with the next quarterly update due
>>> any day now, the Athena problem may go away if we get some lovin' in the
>>> next 2.4 kernel update and I build a new installer based on that, and the
>>> whole concept of the Athena install working at all on the gx620 is based
>>> on the currently-dev-cell-only installer volume.]
>>>
>>> The Dell gx620 has some hardware that our software options haven't quite
>>> caught up with, and (as of July 2006) some special (but easy) steps are
>>> necessary for a successful install on this platform.
>>>
>>> 1) For stock RHEL4, the install won't configure X properly. Do the
>>> install in text mode (once the machine starts booting from the install
>>> CD, there will be on-screen instructions for this), and when the
>>> install is complete edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the display
>>> driver spec of "radeon" with "vesa".
>>>
>>> 2) For Athena, you'll need to change a BIOS option. Boot the machine and
>>> press F2 during the startup sequence to enter setup mode. From the
>>> main setup page, use the up/down arrow keys to select "Drives" and
>>> press Enter, then select "SATA Operation" and press enter. Use the
>>> left/right arrow keys to select "Combination" (instead of the default
>>> of "Normal") and press Enter. Press escape to end setup mode, then
>>> "Save/Exit" to confirm your changes. After this, you should be able
>>> to install normally, and you can switch the SATA mode back to "Normal"
>>> after the install if desired. (The Athena installer will
>>> automatically deal with the X problem described above.)
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
