Floppy installation problem
Here is a SHOUT for some quick ASSISTANCE: (please) Any help you
can direct this way would be greatly appreciated. My email
address is: wesj@halcyon.com .
PROBLEM: Can't get the Debian 1.1 initial installation to work
from diskettes. I think I understand the problem in a general
way. The kernel goes into a panic trying to locate the hard
drive controller. Some facts as I know them.
HARDWARE
1. Machine/mother board/chips/etc: AT 486, UMC8881 chipset, CPU
AMD 5x86 - Real Mode, 135.13 MHz, AMI Bios (C)1994, with 16 Megs
of RAM as extended memory.
2. Hard drive controller is an Adaptec AHA-2842. The SCSI
controller utility states: AHA-2840VL/2842VL at Port 1C00h .
The HOST Adapter Interrupt (IRQ) Channel is 11. The HOST Adapter
SCSI ID is 7. Termination is enabled on the controller card.
3. Two Maxtor SCSI drives, model LXT-213S, are connected
internally in series to the controller. The last SCSI drive is
terminated. SCSI ID's are 0 (80h) and 1 (81h).
4. The IRQ assignments taken from the Dos program IRQINFO.EXE
are:
0 = System Timer
1 = Keyboard
2 = 2nd IRQ Controller
3 = Com2, disabled
4 = Com1
5 = Nothing
6 = Floppy Disk Controller
7 = LPT1
8. RealTime System Clock
9. Video/Add-in Card, enabled, not active
10. Nothing
11. Hard Drive Controller
12. Nothing
13. Math Coprocessor
14. Nothing
15. Nothing
5. The hardware performs preperly under Dos 5.0. Both hard drives
function.
LINUX INSTALLATION
1. I downloaded the Debian installation diskette files on
11/18-19/96.
2. I followed installation instructions found in file
install.txt.
3. The hardware setup seems to be setup properly as per debian
installation instructions.
4. Disk images were written to floppy using rawrite.exe, and not
rawrite2.exe. I had a copy of rawrite.exe that I picked up when
installing slackware 1.2.12. The writing to floppies seemed to
work properly. I now have a copy of rawrite2.exe, but I don't
think the use of rawrite.exe instead of rawrite2.exe is the
nature of the problem.
5. Installation from the floppies starts out properly using
kernel 2.0.0. I get to the initial installation prompt. If I
hit <enter> the installation proceeds further but stops in the
SCSI installation section. Following the help under F4, Adaptec
controllers 284x made no difference in the outcome using a
command line switch.
6. Installation lines I can read to the point of kernel stopage
are as follows:
aic7xxx: Downloading sequencer code...done
aic7xxx: Resetting the SCSI bus...done
NCR53c406a: no available ports found
aic7xxx: (aic7xxx_isr) Encountered spurious interrupt.
PPA: unable to initialise controller at 0x378, error 2
scsi0 : Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 3.2/3.1/3.0
scsi : 1 host
aic7xxx: Scanning channel A for devices.
aic7xxx: (aic7xxx_isr) BRKADRINT error(0x1):
Illegal Host Access
Kernel panic: aic7xxx: (aic7xxx_isr) BRKADINT, error(0x1) seqaddr(0xd9).
And the system halts at this point.
7. I looked around for documents that may shed some light on this
problem at ftp.debian.org, but haven't located anything to date.
Left to my own resources, it seems the hardware port address for
the SCSI controller is at 1C00h (see point 2 under HARDWARE),
while the Debian floppy installation program is trying to
initialise the controller at 0x378 (see point 6 above under PPA
line). However, if this is the problem, I don't know how to fix
it. I assume that a command line switch at installation can
correct the problem, but I need some syntax to make this work
properly.
If there are any kind souls who recognize my problem, and
know the solution, please contact me by email, or send me a phone
number and we can talk on my nickel.
Wes Jennings, Email: wesj@halcyon.com
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