Re: Boot kernel hangs
Hi,
I might be able to help.
The DC390 appears to be for a tekram SCSI card.
Debian 2.1 has been around for a while now, maybe there is some sort of
conflict between your new Iwill 2936 (Adaptec?) scsi card and the old
tekram driver. The original debian 2.1 boot floppies were based on the
2.0.x kernel which may have pre-dated the 2936 card?
The current debian boot floppies contain a newer kernel (v2.2.14) and
drivers so this may be a solution to your problems. Personally i would
consider unplugging the SCSI card, but thats something i would be
confortable with.
The current version of debian boot floppies (version 2.2.7) are being
debugged for the forthcoming release of debian v2.2 which is currently
feature frozen.
The 2.2.7 floppies have a few new features, including a network install,
dont worry about these CD thingys, judging from your email address you
should get pretty good speed from the aarnet mirror (i miss the 100kB/s
i got from jcu.edu.au last year, modems suck).
The current release of debian boot floppies are at the following
address. (and other debian mirrors)
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/linux/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/
Download that directory (~20MB)and the ./disks-1.44/root.bin (and keep
that file in its own directory. You should then be able to start the
install.bat from windows. Once you have installed the base you can do a
network install from the aarnet mirror to install the rest of the
distribution (whichever packages you select).
If you cant install from the current boot-floppies then it would be
helpfull if you get back to us, as i say the current boot floppies are
in the debugging process so any bugs you exposed now will be worked on.
It is hard to debug an older release.
No dont convert to Suse, debian gives you more freedom ! (you just said
that to stir us up didnt ya ;-)
Good luck
Glenn McGrath
"Dr. Gordon Monro" wrote:
>
> 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
>
> --
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-request@lists.debian.org
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: