ChrisSavery

Hello,

First I have to say I'm a long term user of Centos in a server environment and familiar with many aspects of using linux. I'm now 3 days into trying to make Linux my desktop and getting seriously fatigued and ready to revert back to Windows. I'm sure it wasn't meant to be so difficult.

This is my third attempt at getting a useful Linux desktop. First I tried Centos 4 and it worked great but was quite old and so could not run the current Skype client (needed!) and has an older Firefox version. I went looking for a newer and better desktop. Tried Ubuntu Gutsy - first install failed. Repeated again and it worked. I have a dead dvd writer so cannot burn an image to install from. I managed to get Ubuntu to install from a second hard drive but it would only do so with their alternate install iso. That one doesn't install a graphical desktop. After more than a day of trying to get around buggy startups and stuff I gave up on Ubuntu.

Yesteday and today I have been trying to get Fedora 7 loaded. I was able to do a network install from another machine using NFS. First install went wonderfully right to the end. I really was impressed and thought this was going to be it and I'd have a good desktop going. BUT no when I rebooted it wouldn't boot up on the new installed system. I checked a few things and decided to reinstall again as this had fixed the issues with Ubuntu before. Second attempt went the same: perfectly. But still no boot. Damn, this is getting frustrating. Why did Centos install so easily but these newer Linux version not?

Ok. So at boot it loads the kernel fine from the boot partition. It looks for the Logical Volumes and doesn't find any. Stops after that with kernel panic.

Stange details about install - maybe... during install the system recognizes my primary drive as sdc and the boot aprtition is sdc1 and the lvm partition is sdc2. The grub parms are set to boot on hd0,0 and root is /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 as default install.

But at boot the primary drive is hda and boot is hda1 and root is hda2.

Asus motherboard has a Fasttrack BIOS that I have two additional drives installed on in striped format. That parition is NTFS and I've been skipping it and ignoring it during install. It was deselected during install so that it wouldn't be touched by Fedora install process.

Since I have no CD/DVD image I have been booting off the diskboot.img from a USB drive. This has been working very well. I can go completely through the boot, install from NFS with no issues except the drives all appear as sda, sdb (the ntfs partition that is ignored) and sdc (the target partition which is a single seagate drive I intend to use), and sdd (the USB boot, which Fedora install keeps wanting to wipe out but I tell it not to).

SO NOW. Have booted into NFS rescue image and it will successfully find the correct LVM partition (sdc2) and mount it in /mnt/sysimage - everything appears normal there. But once again when rebooting into grub and sdc1, sdc2 (now seen as hda1, hda2) it still reports "finding volumes" and reports NOT FOUND. Attempt to load /dev/root but fails and kernel panics.

Does any expert out there have any idea what's going on here and how to get my system up?

Thanks in advance. I'm really ready to re-install Windows and give up. I don't want to but seriously, wouldn't you?

Thanks for reading all this.

Chris

Dapper Dan

Actually no. As the saying goes, it's easy going in, but hard coming out...

I know what you mean about Skype. I'm running CentOS on one box that I need Skype on and it simply will not install! I have Skype working easily on Ububtu, Slackware 12 and even Crux 2.3 so go figure why it's so damned difficult if not impossible to get Skype working in CentOS.

I'm not sure why you are having such difficulty. I've recently encountered a lot of problems trying to continue using CentOS and Fedora. So much so that I'm abandoning RedHat based distro's completely.

There's no way I can know if I'm right, but my hunch is that if you do the install from a regular Ubuntu install CD the results will be different.

Sorry I couldn't help more.

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ChrisSavery

Well, it seems there is a bug related to mkinitrd and F7 and the install process. I tried various patches and things to get around it but still cannot get it to boot. I looked at the init script in the initrd image and it seems that vgscan gets run and thats what decides to quit because it cannot find any lvm vol groups. Seems like a pretty serious bug to me as LVM is the default install layout. Oh well. Trying now to install onto a ext3 partition instead. Bummer. Why that bug affects me and not others is still a mystery but something is confusing lvm vgscan.

Chris