Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

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mathog
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Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

Post by mathog » 2019/06/26 22:06:15

Greetings.

Trying to install Centos 7 onto an older computer currently running Mageia 4. It has an HDAMA Arima motherboard with two dual core Opteron 280s. The installation media is a USB key. It has a SIL 3114 SATA controller on the motherboard, which never worked with SATA2 disks, and a second SIL 3124 SATA controller in a PCI slot to which the system disk is attached. In MGA4 these controllers show up as:

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01:07.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
03:01.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3124 PCI-X Serial ATA Controller (rev 01)
This is what happens:

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1. plug in the USB key
2. reboot
3. at the grub prompt from the hard drive enter:
   root (hd1)
   chainloader +1
   boot
4. The text installer comes up after an error message about the graphic installer failing.
5. Set the time zone
6. Try to choose disk/set partitions to use
This is where things go wrong. When it enters that menu it says:

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No disks connected, please shutdown the computer, connect at least one disk and restart to complete the installation
Use Alt-tab to get to the command line though, and the disk is there. It is /dev/sdb and there is no problem mounting its partitions. For instance

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mkdir /tmp/foo
mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/foo
ls /tmp/foo
#shows top level of existing / (root) partition
So, what is it that the installer doesn't like? Clearly the running OS (from the USB key) can see the disk. Is there something I can do to coerce the installer to see the disk before step 7 above? I would have thought this was a case where the driver wasn't being recognized and loaded, but that cannot be it since access to the disk from the command line appears to be normal.

Also after it goes wrong there is no way out. It puts up a Quit, Continue, Refresh menu, but the latter two just put the menu back up and Quit shuts down.

Is there maybe a command line way to tell the installer to do a minimal install into /dev/sdb1, without touching the partition table or the other partitions?

Suggestions? (Other than "get a newer computer", for reasons I won't go into, not an option.)

Thanks.

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TrevorH
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Re: Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

Post by TrevorH » 2019/06/26 22:16:46

I think there's something wrong with your USB key for a start. If it were properly created then you would never see the grub prompt and the fact that you do worries me. The first thing you should see is either

a) on legacy BIOS machines you should see an isolinux boot screen with 3 options and
b) on UEFI machines you should see a grub menu listing the same three choices as a).

Those 3 choices are 1) Install CentOS 7 2) Verify media and install and 3) Troubleshooting.

The only reason I can think of for the installer to be falling back to text mode is lack of RAM. How much does this machine have? Minimum for the installer is 1280MB and more is better.

Did you check the sha256sum of the iso image file that you downloaded against the list in our Release Notes before you wrote it to your USB stick? How did you write the iso image to your USB stick? Many, especially Windows, utilities for doing so are broken and corrupt our iso images as they copy them to the USB stick - unetbootin, Rufus with some options selected, both broken.

Release notes for CentOS are available at https://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes

Information on USB key based installs can be found at http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

mathog
Posts: 258
Joined: 2008/07/09 23:52:06

Re: Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

Post by mathog » 2019/06/26 22:36:05

TrevorH wrote:
2019/06/26 22:16:46
I think there's something wrong with your USB key for a start. If it were properly created then you would never see the grub prompt and the fact that you do worries me.
I don't think the BIOS can boot from the USB key. It boots from the internal disk to grub, and then grub is happy to boot from the key. Nothing wrong with the key.
TrevorH wrote:
2019/06/26 22:16:46
The first thing you should see is either

a) on legacy BIOS machines you should see an isolinux boot screen with 3 options and
b) on UEFI machines you should see a grub menu listing the same three choices as a).

Those 3 choices are 1) Install CentOS 7 2) Verify media and install and 3) Troubleshooting.

The only reason I can think of for the installer to be falling back to text mode is lack of RAM. How much does this machine have? Minimum for the installer is 1280MB and more is better.
Those 3 choices are what I see once it finally boots. Seems to be USB 1 ports, it takes forever to get to that point.

The machine has 4GB of RAM. The graphics on the Arima motherboard shows up in dmesg as:

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VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Rage XL PCI
It may be sufficiently obscure that the installer doesn't have the right driver for it.

The USB key was made on a linux system, iso copied to key with dd. This key was already used to install on a different (much more modern) system, where it worked exactly as expected.

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TrevorH
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Re: Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

Post by TrevorH » 2019/06/26 22:45:27

Ah, ok, I thought it was booting from USB and finding a corrupt grub config file and dropping to the command prompt.

Random thought: the text mode installer is useless - as in it doesn't even let you customise partitioning or software selection - so I would first try doing a vnc install.

Append a space followed by the word vnc to the end of the kernel command line - if the machine is that old I assume it's legacy BIOS - by hitting tab. You could also remove 'quiet'. Using vnc assumes that the network card has a driver and that you have a machine on which you can run vncviewer. The installer will spit out the ip address and port number that the installer is using and you can connect to that remotely and get the GUI installer that way. That might tell you something different or give different errors.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

mathog
Posts: 258
Joined: 2008/07/09 23:52:06

Re: Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

Post by mathog » 2019/06/26 22:52:24

This is the partition table on the disk, from parted -l:

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Model: ATA WDC WD1002FAEX-0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  53.7GB  53.7GB  primary   ext4            boot
 2      53.7GB  1000GB  947GB   extended
 5      53.7GB  58.0GB  4295MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)
 6      58.0GB  1000GB  942GB   logical   ext4
The disk was never part of any RAID array. smarctl shows no problems with the disk.

Would the installer write an error message to some log file which might give us a clue why it does not see the disk?

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TrevorH
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Re: Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

Post by TrevorH » 2019/06/26 22:58:45

I checked and the CentOS 7 kernel still ships sata_sil24 which claims to support 1095:3124 so I think it should work. My first concern is that the text mode installer might be so dumb that it doesn't even know what to do if the disk is already partitioned and not to its liking. If you can then I'd try the vnc installer and see what that says.

The text mode installer has almost zero flexibility in what it installs unless you can use a kickstart file to tell it what to do.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

mathog
Posts: 258
Joined: 2008/07/09 23:52:06

Re: Centos 7 cannot see disk for installation

Post by mathog » 2019/06/27 00:31:08

I spoke too soon about the RAID. Going back through my notes I found this (from 6 years ago):
For the 3124 to be able to boot a single disk it must first be configured as a single disk concatenation set.
Apparently the firmware on the card was RAID only. That didn't bother the Mageia 3 and 4 installers, but apparently it is a problem for current Centos. Maybe I will boot the installer and just copy a Centos 7 image over from another system and then fix up the boot loader.

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