Installing taroon under VM

Hi, All

I'm attempting to try out the Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 2.9.5AS 
(taroon) by installing it under VM/ESA.  The odd thing is that the Disk 
Druid (and the Autopartition method as well) comes up with /dev/dasdr as 
the disk to use, not /dev/dasda as I had hoped.

In trying to track this problem down I did "cat /proc/dasd/devices" and 
saw that all my
devices, dasd and non-dasd, were listed (see below).    Perhaps this is 
a known bug in the
dasd driver?

A separate annoying problem is that the disk my sysadmin assigned me was 
not virgin but
had a copy of our UTS operating system on it.  Using that disk led to 
the problem that anaconda
could find no dasd at all to use for the install.  I solved that problem 
by using the DDR program under CMS to copy a Linux CDR disk image onto 
the assigned disk.

Perhaps there's no way around these installation problems other than for 
anaconda to present
the installer with a list of dasd and let the installer choose which one 
anaconda should use.
I suspect this could get to be a nontrivial operation, because I expect 
anaconda is somehow "testing" what's on each disk, and it should exhibit 
how it categorizes the disks at the time it asks which to use.  But this 
is pretty important stuff, and a fix for this Beta version of Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux for S/390 is needed with highest priority, I believe.

I've received scant to no mail lately on this mailing-list.  Is there 
another venue that is being
used for discussion of Red Hat on S/390?  Should I be sending email like 
this to another list?

Richard Hitt   [email protected]


Output of cat /proc/dasd/devices:
[root@myself00 lib]# cat /proc/dasd/devices
0009(none) at ( 94:  0) is dasda      : unknown
000c(none) at ( 94:  4) is dasdb      : unknown
000d(none) at ( 94:  8) is dasdc      : unknown
000e(none) at ( 94: 12) is dasdd      : unknown
0190(ECKD) at ( 94: 16) is dasde      : active at blocksize: 4096, 19260 
blocks, 75 MB
019d(ECKD) at ( 94: 20) is dasdf      : active at blocksize: 1024, 50490 
blocks, 49 MB
019e(ECKD) at ( 94: 24) is dasdg      : active at blocksize: 4096, 31500 
blocks, 123 MB
0191(ECKD) at ( 94: 28) is dasdh      : active at blocksize: 4096, 1260 
blocks,
4 MB
0620(none) at ( 94: 32) is dasdi      : unknown
0621(none) at ( 94: 36) is dasdj      : unknown
0622(none) at ( 94: 40) is dasdk      : unknown
0623(none) at ( 94: 44) is dasdl      : unknown
0120(none) at ( 94: 48) is dasdm      : unknown
33b8(none) at ( 94: 52) is dasdn      : unknown
33b9(none) at ( 94: 56) is dasdo      : unknown
0121(none) at ( 94: 60) is dasdp      : unknown
0141(ECKD) at ( 94: 64) is dasdq      : active at blocksize: 4096, 36000 
blocks, 140 MB
0140(ECKD) at ( 94: 68) is dasdr      : active at blocksize: 4096, 
601020 blocks, 2347 MB
0190(none) at ( 94: 72) is dasds      : unknown
019d(none) at ( 94: 76) is dasdt      : unknown
019e(none) at ( 94: 80) is dasdu      : unknown
0191(none) at ( 94: 84) is dasdv      : unknown
0141(none) at ( 94: 88) is dasdw      : unknown
0140(none) at ( 94: 92) is dasdx      : unknown
[root@myself00 lib]#