Re: Installation report: FAILED on i386
Herbert Xu wrote:
>Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com> wrote:
>> 2 Serial ATA drives, 1 IDE drive, e1000 Ethernet card.
>>
>> * It hangs on "loading module ide-detect" if RAID is disabled in the BIOS.
>> * If RAID is enabled in the BIOS, it gets past that, but it never detects
>> either Serial ATA drive.
>> * DHCP configuration is slow and flaky but eventually works.
>> * Proceeding with the other drive, debootstrap fails -- wget fails
>> to download the Release file for sarge with a "Hostname not found" failure.
>> This pretty much scotches any install attempt, no workaround.
>
>Since you have a workaround for the hang, please get the system
>installed so that you can test the kernel-image packages. Once
>you're there, please test 2.4.24-1-386 as well 2.4.18 to see if
>either one works.
Well, my primary computer died, but now I'm on a third machine for email, so I
can work on this again.
Unfortunately, I can't install Debian on any bootable modifiable drive on the
new machine, and I can't boot from any modifiable drive I can install Debian
on.
So I tried booting from a number of different CDs.
* the beta2 installation disks hit the hang if "RAID" is disabled in the BIOS,
and can't find the disks at all if it's enabled.
* The current Knoppix (kernel 2.4.22) does the same thing, except that the
hang there hangs the whole machine, and can't be avoided during the boot
process.
* So I tried Scott Kveton's modified boot-floppies disk
(http://oregonstate.edu/~kveton/debian/) based on kernel 2.4.23. Again,
hangs while booting, preventing anything from working -- unless "RAID" is
enabled in the BIOS, in which case it can't find the disks at all.
FYI, the SATA chipset is Intel, presumably either ICH5 or ICH6 (I haven't
actually been able to tell which). The machine is a Dell Dimension XPS.
Hope this helps in tracking down the problem.
And if you have any suggestions for how to break this Catch-22 situation
between the BIOS and Linux, please tell me. :-) Maybe there's some scheme I
haven't figured out yet with SYSLINUX or something to boot in Windows or a
floppy or CD, but then load the kernel from a modifiable drive, so that I
could try out different kernels and kernel modules (in an attempt to find one
which recognizes the SATA disks), without burning a new CD each time?
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