Re: Debian installer for Apple XServe
On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 12:47:22PM +0100, Pip Oomen wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
>
> >Do you have RAID on that machine's disk ? This may be one of the
> >problems.
>
> RAID is supported on the machine, but not used. The nightly of march
> 25th has the same problem as the nightly from the 22th, i.e. it boots
> correctly, but the debian-installer never presents its 'initial' screen
> (although it is running).
The one about choosing languages and such ?
> >Huh ? What do you mean by partitioning section ?
>
> The place where you decide (or let the installer decide) what partitions
> on what disk you want. But since the detection process does not find any
> hard disk drives, the partitioning fails, and hence install is useless.
Ok, understood. I really need the dmesg (or /var/log/messages) output.
> >>With nightly 20040322 it does boot the installer kernel (and I do
> >>get vc's on 2/3, etc) but the debian-installer process just sits there
> >>with a black screen and a block cursor in the lower left-hand corner.
> >At which moment is that ?
>
> The process list show the debian-installer is running, but it never
> presents anything. So, kernel loading goes fine, and init is started,
> but the main process started by init (debian-installer) just sits there
> waiting for something... killing it (or its subprocesses) off, just
> restarts it into the same situation ;)
Very weird.
> >Also, the early march di used the 2.4.22 kernel still, while we are
> >using 2.4.25 now. I don't remember exactly when the change was. Can you
> >try booting the corresponding 2.4.25 and 2.4.22 kernels, and see what it
> >does say about your disk.
>
> Further inspection of stuff detected by the running kernel shows that
> there is no problem with detection of the IDE interface (/dev/hda ->
> cdrom), but the IDE disk does not show up at all. Looks to me this is
> related to a kernel configure option, or worse, a missing/invalid driver
> for the IDE drives on Xserve.
Yes. I am not familiar enough with pmac hardware though.
> The early march installer worked better in that the debian installer at
> least asked me things. That is not happening with the most recent
> builds. However, it looks like the kernel has a problem with proper
> detection of the disk(s) attached to the system.
It was using the 2.4.22 kernel though, this may be the difference.
> Are the CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE_PMAC* enabled for the kernel?
Yeah :
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE_PMAC=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE_PMAC_ATA100FIRST=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA_PMAC=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA_PMAC_AUTO=y
Same on both kernels.
> [ on a sidenote, where can I find the kernel-configs that are used by
> the installer kernel? ]
in the package they are coming from. I am not sure they are included in
the kernel .udeb, but they are in the corresponding kernel-image.deb. It
would be interesting to include them somewhere though, i will ask joeyh
about this.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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