Bug#236745: Debian-installer
On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 11:42:18AM -0300, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Jack Carroll <dischord@myrealbox.com> [2004-05-29 16:18]:
> > Regarding the lspci command, the AHA1542 is not a PCI board. It's
> > an ISA, non-PNP board. It does have a boot ROM, and floppy installers up to
>
> Oh, right. We don't support automatic detection of ISA cards. So I'm
> afraid you'll have to load the manually manually.
That would be enough to stop a newbie cold. I hope it's on the
to-do list. The way Red Hat used to handle it was to always ask "Do you
have any SCSI devices?" before starting the partitioning program. If the
answer was yes, it would ask for host adapter type, IO base address, and
IRQ. If you want, I can run an old RH installer and describe the dialog in
more detail.
> Does debian-installer give you a listing of modules to load during
> hardware detection?
No. I didn't even find a clue to where I could manually interrogate
a list of available modules.
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Here's the test report.
I downloaded new floppy images from the URL you gave and wrote them
to floppies. Actually "/debian/" isn't part of the path. I checked the
floppies against the images with diff; no errors reported.
The test ended when the program hung trying to partition /dev/sdb.
Target system: "jeeves", Pentium-133, 32 MB, on-board CS5436 VGA adapter, 1
IDE disk, 2 SCSI hard disks and a SCSI CD-ROM on an AHA-1542 ISA SCSI host
adapter, 1 Tulip Ethernet board and 2 PCI NE-2000 clones. Machine is not
capable or booting from CD. It can boot from floppy or hard disk.
Inserted boot floppy, powered up.
First two floppies read in.
Hit return to select default installation. Didn't try using aha1542
parameters.
Installer selected "low memory" mode.
Followed "Load drivers from floppy" prompt with net drivers floppy,
as usual.
DHCP failed to get an address. Manual IP configuration of Tulip
board succeeded. Accepted default "ftp.debian.org".
"Loading components of Debian installer" hung at 84%, "Retrieving
prebase config". It timed out. Retry succeeded. This behavior is typical;
every run with previous test versions of debian-installer did the same
thing, usually around 88%.
The partitioner started spontaneously, without offering to load any
SCSI modules. Only the IDE drive was offered for partitioning.
Went to console #2 and commanded "modprobe aha1542".
Returned to console #1, hit "go back" and "detect hardware".
Partitioned started up again, and all three hard disks were offered for
partitioning.
The partitioner operator interface took some getting used to. It
would help if every menu item had a ">" in front of it, to identify it as a
menu item. Configured partitioning as follows:
/dev/sda1 /boot reiserfs
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 / reiserfs
/dev/sdb1 /var reiserfs
/dev/sdb2 /home reiserfs
Console #1 reported creating file systems on /dev/sda1 and dev/sda3,
/then hung with the final message "Creating ext3 file system for var in
/partition #1 of SCSI1 (0,1,0) (sdb) 0%".
The final few messges on console #4 were:
syslog.warn klogd: SCSI device sda: 4201304 512-byte hdwr sectors (2151 MB)
syslog.info klogd: p1 p2 p3
syslog.notice klogd: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d0/0)
syslog.notice klogd: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d0/0)
syslog.notice klogd: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0)
syslog.warn klogd: VM: killing process parted_server
For diagnostic purposes, I booted the system into Libranet 2.7 from
the IDE disk and ran a few simple tests on the SCSI disks to make sure they
were still working.
mount -t reiserfs /dev/sda1 /h1
failed with "wrong fs type". With ext3 it succeeded.
Same result with /dev/sda3.
mount -t reiserfs /dev/sdb1 /h5
succeeded. Most likely left over from a previous install.
mount -t reiserfs /dev/sdb2 /h6
succeeded.
The latter two filesystems were empty. Copying a couple of random
text files to them and reading back succeeded.
All these drives have been in use for a long time without known
problems.
Next, I booted the installer with
expert aha1542=0x330
Said "no" to "Start PC card services?" DHCP failed again. Manual IP
config succeeded again.
Accepted default http://ftp.debian.org again. Hung at the same
point. Retry succeeded again.
On the "Detect Hardware" screen, aha1542 was not listed. Didn't see
any SCSI host adapter modules listed. Issued modprobe aha1542 by hand
again.
Partitioner showed all partitions on all drives, and agreed with
results of mount tests under Libranet 2.7.
Set up /dev/sda same as before, but /dev/sdb "keep and use" instead
of "format". Saw a message go past something like "Creating reiserfs file
system in partition 3 of SCSI 1".
Got past checking swap space on /dev/hda and /dev/sda. System hung
up for a long time with a blank blue screen and pages of --alloc_pages
messages scrolling past on console #4. Ended in "The attempt to mount a
file system with type reiserfs in at /home failed. ... Do you want to
resume partitioning?"
Attempted to go back to partitioning. Every attempt to start the
partitioner aborted.
End of test.
As they say, any experiment is successful if it produces data. This
one produced data.
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