I am attempting to install Mandriva 2006 on a Dell Poweredge 6400 and have encountered an unusual problem.

The machine is fully populated with 4 P3 700's with 1 Meg L2 cache, with 3 GBytes of RAM on board. An Adaptek PERC 2 RAID controller has two logical drives: sda is 34G in RAID1, and sdb is 240G in RAID5. sda is set as the bootable drive in BIOS, and in LILO.

The installation proceeds without a hitch, and the only sign of trouble comes when the installation tries to reboot the machine after the web update stage, and the machine hangs 'restarting'. Using the BIG BUTTON to complete the process, the machine goes through its self checks OK, then informs me that there are two logical drives, fills the screen with "L 99 99 99 99 99 99 ...." and hangs on boot.

I have several machines running the 2006 distro, and have been installing Mandrake since ver 7. The 2006 distro is running on two IBM Netfinity 5500's with dual processors, and the installation correctly installed the SMP kernel.

I have no idea what is happening here, or how to go about trouble shooting the problem. Is the boot sector corrupted? Have reformated the array, and repeated the installation. Is there a problem installing on a scuzzy RAID array? The Netfinities manage to boot OK. Incompatibility with the Dell PE 6400? A 6400 was used to test loading on a TUX server using Mandriva 2006!

This problem is reproducable on this machine. I have been through the entire process, including reformating and reallocating the disk space. Cananybody point me in the right direction on this?

Problem solved. I reversed the arrays, configuring the 240G RAID5 array as bootable (sda) and the 34G RAID1 as sdb. Still don't know why it worked! Has anybody else encountered this glitch?