SATA modules missing in debian installer on alpha
My Alphastation 500 is running great with Debin since 2 years. The first
installation was on the pure SCSI-Disk on the QLogic Controller (like in all
other Alpha computers). During the days the machine got an cheap SATA
controller (SiI 3114) which was 5-10 times faster with an Seagate HDD. This
works great. All filesystems went to this SATA disk over the time, only
/boot stayed on an very small old SCSI disk (in future a CF card with an
Acard SCSIDE converter which I got very cheap from ebay), because SRM can
only boot from SCSI.
Yesterday I crashed my initrd which forced me to boot from the latest debian
business-card/netinst cd image. Unfortunately on this disks are no SATA
kernel modules. I386 and most other contains an "sata-modules-*-di.udeb",
but alpha is missing that. Without that I was only able to reach my /boot
device and not the root partition staying on the SATA disc to repair my
initrd. As there is no other possibility to repair a debian system on alpha
than with the command line on a installer disk it would be very important to
have all SCSI/IDE/SATA modules somewhere reachable from the CD (on CD or in
the download after init of network) like in the other architectures.
At the end I fixed my problem by extracting the kernel modules from an
standard kernel image also on the CD (the one for later installtion) - which
worked.
This missing modules would also prevent me from reinstalling the whole
system (which is not possible to the only 64 MB boot CF card on the SCSI
controller)!
Is it possible to also build all SATA modules on alpha for di (should I file
a bug report? -> which category)? I think they were left off because alpha
never had sata disks in their systems. But upgraded systems could have it.
And for example USB storage drivers are also on the CD which are also very
uncommon for alpha.
-----
Uwe Schindler
H.-H.-Meier-Allee 63, D-28213 Bremen
http://www.thetaphi.de
eMail: uwe@thetaphi.de
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