still-extant potato boot problems (kmod/runany modprobe loop)

[Daniel Barclay <dsb@smart.net>]

Are there any fixes (or even diagnoses) yet for the following problem?
Has anyone else even seen these symptoms?



Earlier I reported a problem with installing potato (from scratch)
and getting errors at boot time like:

   kmod: runaway modprobe loop assumed and stopped

and many occurrences of:

   modprobe: modprobe: Can't open dependencies files /lib/modules/2.2.17/modules.dep (No such file or directory)

(Note that those errors were from booting the installation boot 
diskettes (rescue.bin/root.bit).  Specifically, it was from 
before I had a chance to make any choices or affect anything.)




I thought I'd try getting to potato by upgrading (a clone of) my 
slink system.  The upgrade went pretty well (well, I accidentally
upgraded the original instead of the clone, but the clone seems
to be working fine) until I installed the 2.2.17 kernel and rebooted.  
Those boot-time errors returned.

I also started getting a bunch of other errors, such as:

   - "modprobe: Can't locate module xxx"
     (at bootup; for roughly half of the modules)

   - "start ppp0: SIOCSIFMETRIC: Operation not supported"
     (asynchonously, after something had triggered diald)

   - "Use of setserial/setrocket to set SPD_* flags is deprecated"
     (asynchonously)

   - something like "xmit when interface down"
     (asynchonously)

   - (I can't even ping the other end of my diald's PPP connection 
      (I used the numeric IP address logged by pppd when it
      connected).)



Are there any known hardware dependencies that could affect this
(especially when just booted of the installation diskettes)?

Here's what I can think of regarding mysystem:

- Gigabyte GX-5AX revision 3.0 motherboard
- AMD K6-2 300MHz
- 128MB DRAM
- dual IDE controller, UDMA/33
- IDE disks on hda, hdc
- IDE CD-ROM on hdd
- Diamond Viper V330
- TekRam DC390-F SCSI card (for tape drive; no disks attached)
- SoundBlaster 16 (?; version that causes "missing second channel" message in
  2.0.38/slink )
- USB ports (not used)
- standard floppy
- no network card (I use ppp via diald)
- no ZIP drive
- nothing special or weird that I can think of

- works fine under my Slink system 


Can anyone help me with this?  I've been trying to upgrade
to potato for over a week.  


Thanks,
Daniel
-- 
Daniel Barclay
dsb@smart.net
(Hmm.  A little worrisome:  http://www.junkbusters.com/cgi-bin/privacy
                            http://www.anonymizer.com/snoop.cgi )