F12 installation hangs on HP ML-350

[billgreene]

I'm installing F12 on a new HP ML-350 G6. The machine has 4 Gb memory, and a Smart Array P410i SAS controller. There are two 72 Gb disks set up as a RAID 1. I'm using a full install DVD. There are no other storage devices other than the RAID, a USB tape drive, and the DVD drive.

When I try to install F12 it hangs after setting the keyboard type with "Finding Storage Devices". I've let it sit for an hour or more and it doesn't get beyond that.

F11 installs on the machine with no problem. I've used the F12 DVD on other machines with no problem (but not any other ML-350s).

If I switch to a console session, dmesg shows the driver for the controller (HP CISS) has loaded and the RAID drive recognized. The appropriate devices (/dev/cciss/c0d0, /dev/ccss/c0d0p0, etc.) are all present in /dev.

Thanks for any ideas...

[billgreene]

A follow-up for anyone with the same problem: As of now, this is on Bugzilla (545969) as a kernel bug. However, I've also found that adding acpi=0 at boot gets around the problem.

-- bill

[dmart4]

The same problem with F16. Adding acpi=0 at boot helps only to pass the step mentioned above, but after this installer hangs up when disk repartitioning. "Examinning storage devices" - and no progress.
Please advice a workaround.

[billgreene]

Hi!

First, a correction. The bug number on bugzilla is actually 545968.

The ultimate solution was to turn of the virtualization of directed I/O. I don't have one of those machines handy, but somewhere in the bios settings is the Intel "Virtualization Technology" settings. When I turned off VT-d, there was no problem, and acpi could be turned back on. Credit to bugzilla user jussinredbugz for finding that.

Hope that helps.

-- bill

[dmart4]

Not al all, unfortunately.
F16 installation completed successfully, but installed OS now hangs up during the boot, when mounting filesystems (or immediately after it). F14 works fine.

[billgreene]

We just got a new ML-350, so I tried F16 and it does what you describe.

It installs with no problem but hangs on the reboot at the end. Hitting ESC show messages repeating every second like:

udev ... timeout killing /sbin/modprobe ...

I've seen a number of postings about similar problems, but none of the suggestions have worked. I've been trying to at least get to the point where I could run an update to see if the problem has been fixed.

-- bill

---------- Post added at 03:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:34 AM ----------

Apparently it is a problem with the cciss driver that was fixed in kernel 3.1.16.1.fc16. See

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=275336

[dmart4]

Thank you very much for the confirmation. I've decided to use F15.1 until the bug fix.

[dmart4]

Does anybody know, has this issue been fixed in F16.1?
Should I remain under F15.1 yet, or I can safely upgrade tо F16.1?

[billgreene]

Yes, it was fixed some time ago. See the end of this thread http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=275342 for my work-around. There's probably a much more elegant method, but it works for me.

[dmart4]

Yes, my HP now works fine with F16.1 and F17. Thanks.