Boot kernel hangs
Dear Debian boot-floppy gurus,
I have just tried and failed to install Debian 2.1R4, from the two CD
set. I regard myself as a moderately experienced Unix user, but
certainly not a system hacker.
I have a new computer (AMD K7 based, ASUS motherboard) with two hard
drives, Win98 on one. I wish to install Linux on the other. I have
two IDE controllers:
1st controller: both hard drives
2nd controller: primary CD-ROM, secondary IDE Zip drive 100Mb.
The problem is that when the Linux kernel boots up, it hangs up sfter
I get the message
DC390: 0 adapters found
Whatever probing the kernel does at this point has a strange effect:
when I reboot the machine, the BIOS pauses when it reaches the Zip
drive, and eventually reports
Sec slave drive - ATAPI incompatible.
After that it will not boot into Win98 even.
I actually have to turn off the power (not just press the reset
button) to clear this.
I tried booting up with
linux reserve=<lots of parameters>
I used Win98 to find out the I/O ports and I blocked out the ports for
just about every device on my system, including the second IDE
controller and the video card. I also added the aic7xxx=no_probe
parameter. It didn't help - still hung at the same place.
(I realise that I can have only five argument pairs per statement, so
I needed three "reserve" statements altogether.)
I have an IWill 2936UW SCSI controller, which I don't need during the
installation process (it only has a CD writer attached to it) and a
D-Link DE-528CT ethernet card, which I also don't need during the
installation process. My video card is an AOpen PA3020 (RIVA TNT2
chipset). I do not have an internal modem.
I am reluctant to pull a lot of cards out of my system at this stage,
as I need Win98 working, and I am not 100% confident of being able to
put it all back properly again.
I have found that I _can_ boot using a SuSE Linux CD-ROM. I even
tried making a Debian boot floppy, and then replacing the Debian
kernel with the kernel from a SuSE boot floppy, but that failed: the
kernel booted but then failed to mount the root file system:
kernel panic:VFS:Unable to mount root fs on 08:03
I don't know what this means - maybe the SuSE kernel expects a
different file system type here?
By the way, I tried booting from the 2nd CD (tecra kernel) but it
still hung after the nmessage
DC390: 0 adapters found
I have used Debian before and would like to continue using it. Is
there any way I can turn off the bad probing, or is there a
simpler boot kernel (e.g. one with no SCSI or ethernet support, and a
lot less probing)? Or should I just give up and convert to SuSE?
Gordon Monro
G.Monro@maths.usyd.edu.au
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