Can't format 2nd hard drives on slave nodes in Scyld

[Tony Stocker]

Greetings all,

Well since the last time I posted, I received a copy of the latest Scyld 
(ver. 27BZ-8) from Linux Central.  Using this I didn't have any problems 
with the my 3Com cards or with loading any modules on the host node.  
Woohoo!

I had some problems at first getting the slave nodes to install, but finally 
got beofdisk to format the primary hdd (/dev/hda) on the slave node.

However, the slave nodes have a second hdd as well (/dev/hdb) and I can not 
seem to get beofdisk to do anything to them.  I have created a mapping file 
hdb:4865:255:63 (I modeled it after the working file for the hda hard drive) 
in the same location the mapping file for /dev/hda is, but I can't seem to 
get beofdisk to do anything except fdisk /dev/hda.

I have tried using bpsh to manually sfdisk the drive, but after launching 
the command: `bpsh -n 0 sfdisk /dev/hdb`  all I get is something along the 
lines of: "Checking to see if anyone is using this disk <CR> OK" and then 
nothing, it appears to hang.  I've tried redirecting input to the sfdisk 
command via a file but the same thing occurs.  I've left the process alone 
for several hours but nothing ever happens.

Now aside from manually booting each node with a mini-root floppy and 
manually fdisk & mke2fs each drive (24 nodes), is there ANY way from the 
host node in a Scyld beowulf to format (fdisk/mkfs) these secondary hard 
drives?

-Tony Stocker
akostocker at hotmail.com
OR
astocker at tsdis.gsfc.nasa.gov

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