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Re: Debian setup freezes when trying to remove pcmcia



At 11:14 PM 20/08/2001, Bart Szyszka wrote:
Hi,

I just got a Dell Inspiron 8000 and am getting stuck trying to get the thing
to work. I have WindowsMe setup on a seperate partition, but after trying
to install Debian once I can't get to WinMe because the Debian setup option to
boot from harddrive didn't let me specify what partitions should be available
during boot (or which should be active for that matter). Now I have a
Debian system that loads automatically and stops during boot because of pcmcia. And I can't get to WinMe because of LILO. I've tried reinstalling, but whenever I get to the option to 'Configure PCMCIA' so I could make sure it's not installed,
the Debian setup freezes. Any ideas on how I could go about setting up Debian
and avoid PCMCIA completely. At the rescue disk boot= prompt, is there anything
I could do like pcmcia=noway ? People have suggested that before rebooting a
freshly installed system, I should try to either remove pcmcia or go to /etc/ and edit a file that starts with an 'r' (rc2.d?) to get rid of some line that deals with pcmcia. Problem is that there's no dpkg at this point in the install for me to be able to just remove pcmcia and there's no file or directly that starts with an 'r' in /etc/ either.
I'd appreciate some help. Thanks!

You'll probably have to reinstall Debian from scratch to make this work.

When installing, ignore the "Configure PCMCIA" but choose "Edit Kernel Boot Options" (or something like that), and add "PCMCIA=no" (without the quotes). The system should boot fine without PCMCIA. As the installation continues, Debian will ask you if you want to remove the PCMCIA package - say no. Once you finish setup and you boot to the command line (there are further hassles ahead for getting X working, but I'll leave that for another day), edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts to remove the port "0x800-0x8ff" - it's the middle of three ports listed near the beginning of the file. Once you've done this, edit /etc/lilo.conf (I think that's what it's called) and remove (or comment out) the "PCMCIA=no" line. Then run lilo, and reboot - PCMCIA should load no problem.

HTH,

Noah



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