Hi Lev.

The errors you see are weird indeed.

As you say that the hw configuration of the 2 problematic machines is
identical to that of the machines which work, I would try to wipe out
whatever is on the two nodes and start everything from scratch. To do
this I usually get a bootable recovery disk (a good one is Tom's boot
disk, downloadable from http://www.toms.net/rb/), start your node from
the floppy, and then do a fdisk on /dev/hda, wiping out all existing
partitions. At this point try and install the node with LCFG using
exactly the same redhat73-cfg.h file as the other nodes (i.e. remove all
the extra configuration options you added during your tests).

Ciao

            Emanuele

Lev Shamardin wrote:
>
> Hello, all.
>
> We have some strange errors on the part of our nodes. The first thought
> was that these are hardware problems, but our hardware experts said that
> everything is fine with the hardware. So, what do we have:
>
> We are installing nodes with the LCFGng. On some of the nodes the
> /dev/hda1 partition (which is /boot) is mounted as VFAT (?!) by the LCFGng
> installation. This causes a lot of problems, of course, and installation
> failure.
>
> The first thought was that there are bad blocks on the HDD. I've added
> this to the profile:
>
> EXTRA(fstab.disks)
> fstab.mkopts_hda1 -c
>
> The bad block check was passed successfully, no bad blocks were found.
>
> The /dev/hda1 partition is formatted as ext3. I've tried to add these
> lines to the machine profile, but it does not help:
>
> EXTRA(fstab.entries) hda1
> fstab.vfstype_hda1 ext3
>
> During the LCFGng installation I get these strange messages:
>
> FAT: did not find valid FSINFO signature.
> Found signature1 0x0 signature2 0x0 sector=1.
> <...>
> Directory 1: bad FAT
> Filesystem panic (dev 03:01).
>  FAT error
>  Filesystem has been set read-only
>
> After this of course all tries to write anything to the /root/boot during
> the installation fails (I've sent a mail describing these errors to the
> list about a week before)
>
> What is really strange, we have these problems only on 2 out of 5 nodes,
> which have exactly the same hardware configuration, and share the same
> LCFGng configuration profiles...
>
> Any ideas what to do?
>
> --
> Lev SHAMARDIN                          KFVE 4-17   +7 095 9395079
>                           Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics
>                                           Moscow State University

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