Bug#24503: marked as done (dinstall can't find any hard drives with 1.1.105 kernel)
Your message dated 18 Aug 1999 01:25:47 -0400
with message-id <oabtc5slr8.fsf@burrito.fake>
and subject line dinstall can't find any hard drives with 1.1.105 kernel
has caused the attached bug report to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.
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Ian Jackson
(administrator, Debian bugs database)
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Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 01:56:40 -0600 (MDT)
From: Colin Plumb <colin@nyx.net>
Message-Id: <199807130756.BAA18845@nyx10.nyx.net>
X-Nyx-Envelope-Data: Date=Mon Jul 13 01:56:40 1998, Sender=colin, Recipient=submit@bugs.debian.org, Valsender=colin@localhost
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: dinstall can't find any hard drives with 1.1.105 kernel
Package: boot-floppies
Version: 2.0.8
I'm trying to install Debian on a system that needs a 2.1.x kernel
(for the device support), so I tried compiling a suitable 2.1.105
kernel to drop in in place of "linux" when installing, and discovered
that dinstall thought there were no hard drives.
After a considerable amount of digging, I found some suspisious code
in /usr/src/boot-floppies/utilities/libfdisk/fdisk.c which
is supposed to ignore CD-ROMs:
if ((fd = open( device, O_RDONLY )) >= 0 && !timed_out) {
fprintf(stderr, "Opened %s\n", device);
alarm( 0 );
if (ioctl(fd, CDROMVOLREAD, &cdvol )!= 0) {
perror(device);
/* if returns EINVAL or EPERM, this is not a CD-ROM drive */
if ((errno==EINVAL)||(errno==EPERM)) {
if (ioctl(fd, BLKGETSIZE, &size))
size = 0; /* don't complain, size not really
used yet */
size >>= 1; /* convert from 512-byte sectors to kB */
fdisk_add_disk( device, size );
parse_partition( device, fd );
}
}
close( fd );
}
The printouts to stderr are my debugging code which says "Input/output
error" on all my hard drives on a running 2.1.105 system.
It was a significant struggle to get dinstall compiled (no Makefile
seems to do it; I had to add ../busybox/block_device.o to the BBOXOBJS
line in dinstall's Makefile, and then delete main.o so I could
recompile a version with an actual main function.
I could patch the code and make it work, except that I have so far been
completely unable to create boot floppies. It appears that there are a
*lot* of undocumented dependencies, and finding them is frustrating.
(Hell, I still havem't figured out much of anything about dpkg, which
is frustrating in the extreme. There are fifteen different utility programs
for doing things with packages in various forms, and I have no clue
how they fit together into a system. A "theory of operation" document
would be very very valuable.)
--
-Colin
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