Sun Blade 8420s and Ubuntu Linux
Anyone gotten this combination to work yet? We've been able to successfully complete the installation process, but Ubuntu 6.10 and 6.06 both are unable to mount the hard disks during the boot process after the install has completed. We've upgraded the blade's firmware, changed the BIOS settings (ACPI MCFG Table=No), and tried adding "acpi=off" to the GRUB loader line. So far no luck.
For the record, we have been able to get Red Hat Linux working on these blades but we'd much prefer to get a Debian-based distro running instead.
Any hints/tips would be greatly appreciated.
- Chip
[613 byte] By [
chipasuna] at [2007-11-26 22:30:55]
# 1
In case other people follow in our footsteps...
We discovered the problem. The PXE based install process uses the text-based "Alternate" installation program. For some reason - possibly the ILOM virtual console - that program thinks that there are three SCSI hard drives in the blade - sda, sdb and sdc. During the text install, the first physical hard drive in the blades is considered to be "sdb" and the second one is "sdc". It's not clear what it thinks is "sda" at that point.
After the text-based install completes and the system reboots, the mystery drive disappears and the first physical drive is considered to be "sda" and the second one is "sdb". Unfortunately, several of the Linux configuration files aren't informed of the change(!) - specifically, the GRUB config file and the fstab file. The leads to the blade trying to boot from the second physical drive which (typically) does not contain a bootable partition.
To fix the problem, press ESC when the GRUB message is on the screen, then edit the GRUB boot line and change the "sdb0" reference to "sda0", then continue booting things - Ubuntu should come up correctly at that point.
After logging in, bring up a terminal window and use "sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst" to change the GRUB commands permanently from "sdb" to "sda".
Finally, _carefully_ use "sudo nano /etc/fstab" and adjust any "sdb" and "sdc" references. Reboot after saving and things should work fine.
Hope this helps,
Chip
