Re: [Help] resc1440.bin (kernel) crash
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Jimen Ching wrote:
> Please help me. I accidentally hosed my linux upgrade and need to
> reinstall from scratch.
Hmm, how far did your system fall beyond the edge? Chances are that you
may very well be able to fix things and complete the upgrade.
> But when I tried to boot from the rescue disk, the kernel crashed on me.
> I have an AHA-2842 SCSI controller. The kernel detected it and tries to
> reset something. The next thing I see is a message about dereferencing
> a null pointer and the standard register dump from the kernel. The last
> line says: Aiee! Killing interrupt handler. It then sits there and I
> have to press the reset button.
Peculiar. Can you reproduce this? If so, you might want to consider
posting it here, so some gurus get a chance to look at it. Maybe it's a
problem with the kernel build of the Debian rescue disk, maybe it is a
problem in that specific kernel and it's actually worth to post to
linux-kernel.
> I tried building a 2.0.35 kernel and copy it into the rescue disk (which
> is just a dos formated disk). The kernel now boots without problem, but
> when it got to the point of mounting the root fs, I got an error message
> about 'unable to open/access the root device 01:00'. I assume this is the
> ramdisk? I did compile the ramdisk support into the kernel, as well as
> dos fat and dosfs support, adaptec scsi driver, ppp, multi-device, and
> some others that I wanted. Is there something I need to make the kernel
> boot with a ramdisk? Or did I do something wrong when I copied the kernel
> to the floppy? I did run rdev.sh from the mounted floppy. Maybe I did
> that wrong?
First, just to boot from the rescue disk, your kernel doesn't need fat or
dosfs AFAIK. Only when you want to mount dos partitions after the kernel
has booted will you need that. The fact that the Debian rescue floppy is
on a dos filesystem is unrelated to whatever your system does after the
kernel booted.
When you want to use the kernel on the rescue floppy, to boot with the
ramdisk image on the floppy, you have to enable both ramdisk support and
initrd support. If you leave out the initrd support, the ramdisk contain
an empty filesystem after the kernel boots. With initrd support, it loads
the rootfs image into ram before actually booting the kernel.
On the image you should then set the rootdevice to /dev/ram0 (IIRC)
because the kernel makefile makes it default to the rootdevice of the
machine your building on.
> I should note, the kernel I built was compressed. I don't know if the
> 'linux' file on the rescue disk is a compressed kernel. It is 700+k,
> while my kernel is 400+k.
That should be just fine.
> I'll try build a 2.0.34 kernel and see if it is actually causing the
> problem. Any help in this matter is greatly appreciated.
It is a good idea to check out another kernel version if you keep getting
the problem with the adaptec card. But remember to build with initrd
support.
Good luck,
Joost
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