Mário Bessa's picture

I'm trying to install the PDC appliance on an old Pentium 4 machine.

The Live CD boots with the machine and I start the installation process, but when the system is trying to load the installer, it halts after detecting HDD drives and shows me the busybox prompt on initramfs. I don't know what to do next.

I also have 2 hard drives on the machine and I want to setup a software raid array. Is it possible to do so with Turnkey installer?

Can someone please help me?

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Although software RAID is not supported 'out of the box'. There has been some discussion around this previously and the final word is that it is possible, but not all that easily (not sure if anyone has actually tried and succeeded). Have a look here for details. Also there is another thread here which may contain some ideas if you wish to try to figure out RAID support.

Does it run the live session at all? (Not that it means if it does that it should install ok, but it s start). Perhaps it may be worth unplugging one drive and see if that helps. You can always reconnect the drive after install.

Mário Bessa's picture

I've already tried to disconnect almost every posible combination of hard drives but it didn't work. I have a 3rd hard disk drive that was previously unplugged. 

The live cd doesn't run the live session. It boots, it presents the bootloader menu, but doesn't start the install or the live cd, just sends me to the prompt of busybox.

At this moment I'm considering replacing the dvd drive, which is the one I'm using to boot. I tried to install ubuntu server 10.04 but I'm having an issue with the dvd-drive - it boots from there but when the install starts it fails to mount it. I'm imagining it can be a hw failure from the dvd drive. Is it possible by the symptoms I'm describing?

Jeremy Davis's picture

But hard to know until you do some diagnosis (unfortunately I don't know much about it so can't help there). Seeing as the live session won't run either, it is probably worth swapping the CD/DVD drive out for another if you have one handy. Personally I'd do that before you go buy one (just in case thats not the problem).

When you say "it fails to mount it" when installing Ubuntu 10.04, do you mean the CD or the HDD? The reason I asked is that I have had similar issues with a machine (complained that it couldn't mount CD when trying to install 10.04, also wouldn't run the CD live at all - would just reboot with no error message) but a completely identical machine with a different (older) BIOS revision installed fine (and ran live CD fine too).

I didn't work out exactly what the issue was (obviously BIOS related) but I managed to work around it by using the Ubuntu alternative (text mode) CD. It may not be relevant because that was relatively new hardware whereas yours is obviously quite old. Still the text mode installer may be worth a try (although unfortunately TKL isn't available in text mode install - you'd have to go back to vanilla Ubuntu).

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