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The trouble I have encountered centers around the microchannel
ESDI hard drive controller. I must first give props to the folks at Debian, as
their loader was the only one to correctly fish the hard drive geometry
correctly from the bios/controller, every other distro I've tried gives
bogus numbers. I'm using the low memory install disk from the latest stable
Debian distribution (only 4MB of ram, 3,904kb after shadow ram takes its
toll). When the kernel hits the ESDI controller, several strange things
happen:
Partition check:
PS/2 ESDI: integrated ESDI adapter found in slot
1
PS/2 ESDI: DMA arbitration level: 7
PS/2 ESDI: hard
reset...
**can hear an audible "click" from the hard drive
PS/2 ESDI: Attention error. interrupt status: 0F
PS/2 ESDI: status: 08
PS/2 ESDI: Device Configuration Status for drive
0
PS/2 ESDI: Spares/cyls: 2
PS/2 ESDI: Config bits: Zero Defect, Skewed Format,
Non-Removable, Retries
PS/2 ESDI: Number of RBA's 245760
PS/2 ESDI: Physical number of cylinders: 120, Sectors/Track:
32, Heads: 64
eda: eda1 eda2 eda3
At this point, the partition menu comes up, but when I go to
define partitions etc. it says I have no drives. I have 3 partitions on the
drive which I created using partition magic (eda1 = dos, eda2 = ext2, eda3 =
linux swap) which the kernel can see during boot yet can't do anything
with. I haven't been able to get past this point (I've tried MANY different
methods for booting) and am beginning to wonder if Linux will even load on this
system. Are there boot-time parameters I have to add in order for this to work
correctly?
Jeremy
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