Intermittent autoyast failure SLES11.1

Having an odd issue trying to install a SLES11 system using autoyast. Running the same install on the same system works about 50% of the time. The system is a large server with an Areca 1882 raid card. There is an updated arcmsr driver on the install disc. Half the time the install works fine, the other half it gets to the first reboot, then when it boots from the hard disk it fails with the message “Waiting for /dev/disk/by-id/mumblemumble-part2 to appear.” It offers to fall back to /dev/sda2 (which is what mumblemumble-part2 is), that fails, and it drops to shell.

If you take out the install cd and boot, it displays the grub menu installed by autoyast, then gets the same failure when you try to boot the full system. I’ve booted off the cd to a rescue system, and looked at the drives. It appears everything installed correctly, it just fails during 2nd stage grub boot. I’ve grabbed various things off successful & failed installs to compare, about the only difference I found is the following. If I do a “file -s /dev/sda1” (which is the /boot partition) I see this difference:

“Good” install:
/dev/sda1: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version 0x3, LBA flag 0x1, 1st sector stage2 0x29441, GRUB version 0.97

“Bad” install:
/dev/sda1: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version 0x3, LBA flag 0x1, 1st sector stage2 0x15c41, GRUB version 0.97

Note the address after “stage2”. I have no idea what that means, or if it’s relevant, but it’s the only thing I’ve found so far that is different.

Any ideas on what’s going wrong, and what I can do to fix it ?
Thanks

amarold,

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