[Beowulf] Weird CentOS Install Problem

[Jon Forrest]

I thought maybe some of you cluster people might have
seen this.

I have a brand new machine that will be the frontend
of a cluster. It has a 3ware 9650 12-port RAID controller
with 12 1TB drives attached.

I used the "Boot Volume" feature in the RAID controller
to make an 80GB boot volume. I install CentOS 5.2 x86_64
on this and everything installed fine, except ...

When I boot the newly installed machine it stops in
the grub prompt. If I type by hand the commands in
/etc/grub.conf (which I saw by booting from a rescue CD),
the first command "root (hd0,0)" shows that an ext3 partition
was recognized, as it should. However, when I enter the
"kernel ...." command, I get the following error message:

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

What's weird about this is that the root file system starts
on cylinder 1, as confirmed by the fdisk command. This is
using a brand new SuperMicro X7SBE motherboard with the
newest BIOS.

What's even weirder is that the integrator that I purchased
the system from somehow managed to install CentOS 5.
I saw it boot the first time I turned on the system.
I deliberately wiped it out. Needless to say, I have
a message in to them.

Any ideas could cause this?

Cordially,
-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu