Bug#35195: Very late response, but this one is probably due to aic7xxx drive r issues
I'm running slink right now on a Dell Poweredge 6300 with the dual-Xeon (500
Mhz)
processors. Well it's not strictly standard-issue slink right now, the
kernel has been
bumped up to 2.2.10 after the install.
The standard slink rescue floppy won't work on this machine. The symptom
described (blank screen shortly after kernel boots) sounds like a classic
case
of aic7xxx (Adaptec driver) problems. The push-button power-switch on the
box
will fail to work after this failure - you can't turn the thing off. You
literally have to
unplug and replug the power cord to bring the machine back to usable
condition.
The integrated SCSI controller on this box is an Adaptec Ultra-2 that
requires the aic7xxx driver.
The first alternative rescue disk (aic7xxx_only) posted on the debian site
under
"Unofficial updates" worked for me. I still had to use the kernel option
"aic7xxx=no_probe". After getting the boot: prompt from the rescue disk,
just type "linux aic7xxx=no_probe". The Red Hat 6.0 rescue floppy has the
same problem and the same fix.
At the tail end of the install, you have to make sure that the
newly-installed kernel
on your disk drive will also start with the "no_probe" option. So skip the
standard
"Make Linux bootable from hard disk" step, get yourself a second console
(Alt-F2),
edit /target/etc/lilo.conf yourself with append="aic7xxx=no_probe", and
install the boot
sector on the hard disk by running lilo on the /target partition. You can
then reboot
from hard drive without any problems.
- Ganesh.
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