Re: Booting problem

[Stuart Brady <sdbrady@ntlworld.com>]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 06:56:16PM -0400, Gabriel Avila wrote:
> I managed to install everything perfectly but now when i start the 
> initial bootup the system hangs after this line:
> 
> HP SDC MLC: registering the Sytem Domain Controller's HIL MLC.
> 
> after this line it symply stops the booting process. I did gave it time 
> (5hrs) so just in case it needed some time to finish the process but to 
> no avail. Any Ideas are very welcome.
> TIA

IIUC, the kernel that's used in the installer is a uniprocessor kernel,
but I think an SMP kernel is installed.  I don't know what the bug is,
or whether it has been fixed in later kernels.  However, you might be
able to work around it.  From memory, it's something like this:

* Run the installer again.  Answer questions until the initial question
  about partitioning the disk drive.  _Don't_ answer that question.

* Instead, press Alt-F2 and Enter.  You should now get a shell.

* Now do "mkdir /tmpmnt", followed by something like
  "mount /dev/scsi/discs/discN/partM /tmpmnt" where N and M are the disc
  and partion numbers for your root device.  (Although I'm not quite
  sure whether I've remembered that correctly.

* Run "chroot /tmpmnt", and mount any other important partitions.  If
  you have a /boot partition, you'll need to mount that.  You also need
  to mount /proc.

* Run "apt-get remove kernel-image-2.6.8-2-32-smp" to remove the SMP
  kernel image, followed by "apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.8-2-32"
  to install the uniprocessor image.

* Unmount the filesystems.  Provided that I've not missed anything,
  booting might work.

I hope I've not made any mistakes.  There may be a much better way of
doing this, but it worked for me.  You might still have this problem:

http://lists.parisc-linux.org/pipermail/parisc-linux/2005-July/026884.html

That seems to be fixed in later kernel images, though.

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Brady