Re: Laptop install gone haywire
Thanks for the suggestions so far; running the install without
floppy=thinkpad does get me further into the install, but then I get
more strange stuff. The system prints out a set of instructions for
continuing the low-memory install, then follows that with a list of
fdisk choices. At this point it only lists choices 1, "Run the disk
partitioning system in order to make a swap partition," and 4, "Reboot".
So far so good. But right after it prints those fdisk choices, it spits
out a list of errors, which follows:
floppy0: unexpected interrupt
floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c0 repl[1]=0
floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c1 repl[1]=0
floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c2 repl[1]=0
floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c3 repl[1]=0
floppy0: sensei repl[0]=80
attempt to access beyond end of device
02:00: rw=1, want=26, limit=2
attempt to access beyond end of device
02:00: rw=1, want=27, limit=2
I've gotten to this point before, just by trying different boot
options. After this, I can still access the menu choice #1 to attempt
to create a swap partition, but here's what happens: When I enter
choice 1, a list of stuff flies by too fast to catch, followed by the
prompt to choose a hard drive device name and the list of all available
names. [aside: you would think that fdisk would be smart enough to
check and see that I only have one IDE drive and not a list of SCSI
devices as long as my arm, but I guess not all installs can be that
smart.]
After I enter the choice /dev/hda and press enter, I get a repeat of the
instructions followed by the fdisk menu again, this time with choice 2:
"initialize the swap partition" added. If I press 2 and enter, I get
the following set of messages:
Please wait while swap partitions are detected. . .
fdisk: not found
attempt to access beyond end of device
02:00: rw=0, want=27, limit=2
Major problem: unable to read inode from device 02:00
sbin/swapsetup: cannot create /tmp/13: directory nonexistent
The process then stops. If I switch to the terminal on f3, there's
something being repeated too fast to catch. On f4, there are several
repeats of the "attempt to access/02:00" pair of lines above, with the
want= number varying from 19 to 27, and at the beginnning of each line
either a <4> or a <6>.
Like I said last time, I think I can eliminate media trouble, and the
floppy=thinkpad boot option causes even more problems, but I do think
that what I'm seeing is some sort of problem with reading the floppy.
Somebody said I should send along the model number of the thinkpad; it's
2603-17N. The processor is a 486SLC running at 50MHz.
Somebody else said that I should try the boot disk labeled for the
Toshiba Tecra. I haven't tried that (my gut tells me it won't help) but
I will while I wait to see if anybody has any more ideas.
Please, help me save another machine from the clutches of DOS. Getting
it to do what I want wouldn't be such a bad thing either.
Thanks,
-michael
Michael Jinks wrote:
>
> I'm new to this list and new to Debian -- I've been using RedHat for
> about the past two months though. Before that I was very nearly
> Unix-free.
>
> A brief comb through the archives didn't turn up anything that looked
> like it pertained to my problem; if you know better, just let me know
> and maybe point me in the right direction.
>
> I'm doing my first-ever Debian install, and the target machine is an IBM
> thinkpad 486 with 4M RAM. The rescue floppy works fine, up to the point
> where it asks me to insert the root floppy, at which point I've gotten
> several different sorts of errors.
>
> The one I've gotten the most times is:
>
> end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0
> VFS: Cannot open root device 02:00
> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 02:00
>
> This looks to me like a media error, but I've tried two different copies
> of the root filesystem floppy and gotten the same error on both, so now
> I'm thinking it might be an install program goof, or maybe Linux just
> doesn't like my hardware?
>
> I did once get as far as trying to run fdisk, but it didn't behave even
> remotely like I expect fdisk to behave, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't a
> real run.
>
> The boot line I'm using is:
>
> boot: floppy0 floppy=thinkpad
>
> First off, is this syntax even right?
>
> Any and all thoughts appreciated. . .
>
> -michael
>
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