Attempting to install Gentoo on a Compaq Proliant 5000R server. When trying to install, the following arguments are used: boot: gentoo mem=exactmap mem=640k@0 mem=895M@1M doscsi acpi=off noapic What you then see is the following: "loading gentoo.............." "loading gentoo.igz............................" "Ready. You passed an undefined mode number. Press <RETURN> to see video modes available, <SPACE> to continue or wait 30 secs" I select "0" (80x25) under the "VESA VGA" table and continue on. What you then see is: "Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel." and that's it. System hangs, does nothing further. No disk or screen activity, system does not respond to the three-fingered salute. Cycle power. Playing with the 'acpi=off' and 'noapic' options doesn't make any difference. Never gets any futher than this. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Cold boot machine with install-x86-universal-2005.1.iso; 2.At prompt, type gentoo mem=exactmap mem=640k@0 mem=895M@1M doscsi acpi=off noapic, or this with any combination of noapic and acpi=off to see if it makes a difference; 3.When you see "Ready. You passed an undefined mode number. Press <RETURN> to see video modes available, <SPACE> to continue or wait 30 secs" select either "0" from the list, or if you choose to ignore the message, just hit the space bar. Actual Results: Machine freezes with static display of "Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel." Expected Results: Continued with the installation. Compaq Proliant 5000R server, latest BIOS (E16), fitted with 4 x 4.3GB UW SCSI drives, 917504kB RAM (896MB), Compaq SMART-2DH Array Controller, 4 x 200MHz Pentium CPUs, Compaq CRD-254V SCSI CD-ROM. SCSI IDs for the drives are 0-3, CD-ROM ID is 5. SMART-2DH Array Controller is in Slot 7 and RAID 5 implemented. System passes all tests in kernel image Memtest86 when selected. On-board video is switched off and instead an S3 video card with 2MB of RAM is used in PCI Slot 5. Compaq 'F10' Sytem Partition is installed and works OK. Disks are OK because I tried out the hardware by installing DOS on it - DOS found a 12GB drive (still RAID 5)and happily formatted it. Pity DOS doesn't actually do anything useful as an operating system. Oddly enough, if you put in a Redhat 9 install CD, it picks up the hardware, installs the ncr53c8xx driver, loads the cpqarray module, and happily proceeds to install Redhat without a hiccup. I never let it finish, but it got to the stage of selecting packages to install. I fdisked /dev/ida/c0d0 and set it up according to the Gentoo Install Guide, putting ReiserFS on /boot and /, but trying to install Gentoo from scratch produces the same results. Only difference now is the system has a formatted RAID 5 disk with nothing on it because the 2005.1 CD will not install.
Why are you doing all of those memory-related options? There's also a *ton* more options you could be using. For one, you cannot disable APIC on SMP, so you will need to disable SMP if your APIC is bad on that board. I would suggest trying: gentoo-nofb doscsi acpi=off noapic nosmp nolapic
(In reply to comment #1) > Why are you doing all of those memory-related options? > > There's also a *ton* more options you could be using. For one, you cannot > disable APIC on SMP, so you will need to disable SMP if your APIC is bad on that > board. > > I would suggest trying: > > gentoo-nofb doscsi acpi=off noapic nosmp nolapic The reason I use the memory arguments is because it's a Proliant 5000. The BIOS on the Proliant 5000 and 2500 (could be others) incorrectly reports the total RAM installed as 16MB, no matter how much you have installed. The machine has 896MB of RAM so I used the command gentoo mem=exactmap mem=640k@0m mem=895@1m to compensate for that. I did this with the Gentoo 1.4 LiveCD and the thing booted, found the ncr53x825 controller, loaded up the cpqarray module for the SMART-2DH Array Controller, and took me to a command prompt ready to commence an install. This was using kernel 2.4.20 in SMP mode - the exact line was "gentoo doscsi mem=exactmap mem=640k@0m mem=895@1m". Doing the same thing with the 2.6 kernel and using the "memmap" syntax instead of "mem" (which I believe is the correct thing to use with 2.6) results in nothing booting at all, and the system hanging.
Oooops - that line should have read "smp doscsi mem=exactmap mem=640k@0m mem=895@1m" when I got it started with the Gentoo 1.4 LiveCD and kernel 2.4.20
Could you try the new 2005.1-r1 CD? We updated the kernel revision on the CD, so it might resolve this issue.
There have been 2 media releases since this was reported and no response from original poster. I'm going to assume that this has been resolved as nobody else has reported/verified it. If this bug is still present in the 2006.0 release media, please REOPEN this bug.
