Installing SuSE 9.2 on IBM HS20 Blades

[Tux42]

I just spent 2 weeks figuring this out, so I thought I would post it in case someone else had the same problem.

Hardware:
IBM HS20 Blade
Qlogic fiber card QLA2312 ( qla2300 module)
booting from san ( IBM DS4300)
no disk in the blades.

*NOTE: I could not get the FTP install to work, it hung on trying to install the Boot loader*

Installing SuSE 9.2 from CD on blades.
If you use the default install the fibre drives will not be able to boot after installing the boot loader. The drive is detected as sdb, but after the reboot the bios sees it as sda and cannot find sdb. So you get a kernel panic.
However, if you do a manual installation and load the modules manuall (load the usb-mass storage driver for the cd rom, the bcm5700 for the ethernet cards. Load unknown modules (the scsi ones) then load the qla2300 module) the drive will properly show as sda, the bootloader will install properly and you will be able to boot from it.

Also, if you can just use SuSE 9.3 it works perfectly out of the box.

Later

Tux42

[digg1980]

Great Tip. My friend was facing the same problem yesterday and we solved it paced on this.

Thanks,