Installation failure
Hello,
I failed to install the daily build installer CD from 09/02/2004
on a AMD Duron 800 MHz with a 80GB harddisk which was not detected
by the install kernel. The syslog messages were equal to the ones
below but neither the normal install routine nor fdisk or cfdisk
on a text console where able to find the device /dev/hda:
# fdisk /dev/hda
Unable to open /dev/hda
# cfdisk /dev/hda
FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive
When consulting the BIOS at startup: CHS=38322/16/255
An older Knoppix showed better behaviour (the latest one = 3.6 also
failed to start and ha obvious trouble with the hard disk) and I was
able to run cfdisk on the harddisk and copy the Debian installation
manually to the box and got it up and running now. The problem seems
not to occure with installed kernels. Here are the relevant
syslog entries which look like the same for the installed system and
the installation process:
# grep -i hda /var/log/syslog
Sep 5 20:06:00 buran kernel: ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd000-0xd007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
Sep 5 20:06:00 buran kernel: hda: MAXTOR 6L080J4, ATA DISK drive
Sep 5 20:06:00 buran kernel: hda: max request size: 128KiB
Sep 5 20:06:00 buran kernel: hda: 156355584 sectors (80054 MB) w/1819KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
...
But running lilo shows a strange warning which might be a hint for
the problem:
# lilo -v
LILO version 22.5.9, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2004 John Coffman
Released 08-Apr-2004, and compiled at 15:30:00 on Aug 15 2004
Debian GNU/Linux
Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
Warning: Kernel & BIOS return differing head/sector geometries for device 0x80
Kernel: 65535 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors
BIOS: 1024 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors
Using MENU secondary loader
Calling map_insert_data
...
Anybody has a clue here?
Kind regards
Andreas.
PS: Please CC me, I'm not subscribed.
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