Installation stalls - driver question.

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I am attempting a Network installation of openSuse 11.3 on an old desktop which has IBM Boot Manager so that I can boot to one of three OSs, openSuse being the third. Sadly the installation of openSuse fails before the CD initial boot has finished.

Looking at the text log of the starting process the problem appears to be a driver and the last line of text where it stalls refers to eata driver.

There are 4 hard drives in the machine, configured as two RAID 1 arrays driven by a DPT 2144W hardware raid card. (Very old but very good).

If I Google eata I get a good deal on SCSI raid and DPT cards but I am out of my depth when they say a kernel module is needed.

Another concern is that the RAID arrays are configured using a bootable DOS configuration disk and once this is done they are recognized by other OSs such as eCS and OS/2. The arrays are just treated as single drives so these OS installations do not interfere with the card configuration. I am concerned because I cannot afford to lose the data on the drives but it appears the linux driver might want to rebuild the arrays.

Please could somebody give me some help here.

Budgie2

2
  1. did you test the disk (select Media test)
  2. Can you boot from the CD? Is so can we see output of fdisk -l
  3. If this is important data why is it not backed up?
3

Yes and Yes and this installation is in order to back up.
The SCSI RAID card is DPT PM3334UW not 2144 as I wrote previously. I can only boot CD if I use brokenmodules=eata when loading.
I get a warning that there are no hard drives detected and at the stage when you get to select volume/partition there is nothing from which to select. Of course that means there is nothing on which fdisk can run. I am sure the issue is that I need the right driver. If I go into expert installation to select a driver manually there is one “eata” that might be relevant but I have no idea what parameters it requires.
Do you know about these things?
Grateful for any help if you do.
Thanks again.
Budgie2

4

I think I’d query the maker of the card on this. I have heard of hardware cards that also required drivers but have no experience with them.