Append root=/dev/sda1 to your boot command in /etc/aboot.conf. (I
assume you're using aboot not milo?)
Did you partition this disk or format /dev/sda without any partitions?
The lack of a partition table might cause this problem. Why do you have
the message "Unable to read /dev/sda"? It should always be sda1 or
sda2.
If sector 0 truly is bad, this drive may be unusable. Many modern
drives however keep an internal bad blocks list and will reallocate a
block from their spares when one goes bad. Play around with the
smartctl program in the debian package smartsuite, and try 'badblocks -n
/dev/sda' after booting off a cd-rom (/dev/sda? must not be mounted).
labrahemmo@netscape.net [labrahemmo@netscape.net] wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I recently got an alpha 164LX that had a working tru64 installation and it booted fine. Now I've been trying to install the box with debian, but I've run into problems with my scsi drive (seagate medalist st34520n). I installed debian once and all went seemingly fine, but when I tried to boot the freshly installed base system kernel paniced because it could not read the partition table of the drive (that had the root partition). The error message was something like:
>
> partition check:
> sda: scsi0: MEDIUM ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0,
> CDB: Read(10) 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00
> info fld=0x0, Current sd08:00: sense key Medium Error
> Additional sense indicates Unrecovered read error
> scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
> unable to read partition table
> VFS: cannot open root device 08:01
> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01
>
> Restarting the installation cannot check partition table of the drive at boot time, but continues until it's time to partition the drive and tries to start fdisk in an infinite loop. Running fdisk on the second terminal produces an error message "Unable to read /dev/sda".
>
> I suspect that the drive is dying. Is there anything else to do? Could this be a "feature" caused by the late tru64 installation?
--
Cheers,
Bob McElrath [Univ. of California at Davis, Department of Physics]
"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the
votes." -- Joseph Stalin
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