[ale] 2 strange problems have me stumped

[James P. Kinney III]

OK Alers. These have me stumped. 

1) Brand new RedHat 7.2 install will all the patches and upgrades. The
box is a Dell optiplex P4 1.7GHz. There is an external usb hard drive.
According to /proc/bus/usb, it gets connected as /dev/sda. No problem.
Make a mount point (/mnt/lacie) and mount the drive. It works just fine.
So an entry in fstab is created. umount the drive and remount using the
fstab listing. It is OK. Now do the acid test and reboot (sync; shutdown
-r now). The mount point is gone. The fstab entry is also gone. Repeat
the fstab and mount point and mount it OK. un mount it OK. reboot after
another sync and checking that both are written. They are both gone
again. Is there a usb-storage device problem that trashes /etc/fstab
listing for itself?

2) Dell Poweredge 1300 with the AMI Megaraid PERC2/SC scsi raid card.
Under RH7.1 all was well. Upgrade to RH7.2(before I got there). Now the
drive shows up as sdb, no longer sda. So the drive(s) were wiped and a
fresh install applied. Won't boot. Hangs at the grub/lilo screen (both
tried). The megaraid card is recognized and used during setup. From the
boot floppy, it croaks with "failed to mount /". The grub listing from
the install showed the raid5 logical drive as sdb* partitions. I would
like to keep the raid5 setup as this will eventually be a production
box. What is going on? The megaraid card shows as being initialized by
the boot floppy kernel. The hard drive boot never gets to the kernel.
The raid 5 is composed of x3 18G ultra2 scsi drives. I forget the slice
size. The logical drive is configured to boot from drive 0. Is that
going to set the MBR for the logical device to be on the first slice of
drive 0? Since the card presents the logical drive as sda, I shouldn't
need to specify any thing about this being a raid setup. RH7.1 shows it
as sda. RH7.2 as sdb. Ideas?
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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