[TriLUG] hardware problems -- install won't boot

[Ryan Wheaton]

hey y'all.

i'm having a hardware failure somewhere and i can't seem to pinpoint 
it.  I *think* it's a problem with one of the hard drives, but not 
quite sure.

there are 3 identical drives in it on an IDE RAID controller.  Whenever 
I have all three drives active in the logical drive (RAID 0), then the 
install will complete, but when it comes time to boot, I get a kernel 
panic:

crcerror<6> freeing initrd memory:
VFS: cannot open root device "LABEL=/" or 00:00
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00

If i do the install with a certain drive (channel 3) not included in 
the logical drive, then it boots up fine.  This makes me think that the 
drive is bad...
I booted to the rescue disk, and ran fsck on it, and it just kept 
looping through hundreds of inode misconfigurations, but never said 
anything about bad blocks.

I suspected that possibly the memory was bad as well, so I downloaded 
the ISO version of Memtest86+ and ran those tests.  Memtest stopped 
responding in the exact same spot each time I ran it.  I tried running 
it on each stick of memory individually, but got the same results.  I 
think this might have something to do with the fact that memtest was on 
a CD, and I was unable to set the ECC option (there is ECC ram in it).

So, I plan on calling Dell and warranting the drive, but wanted to make 
sure there isn't anything I haven't tried yet to pinpoint the 
problem...  I think that the fact that an install works without the 
drive, but not with the drive tells me a lot... But I might put memtest 
on a floppy just to be sure...

thanks for listening ;-)

-rtw