Problems creating a bootable Debian installation on a Jaz drive (fwd)
Hello all --
I have recently been trying to make a bootable Debian installation on a
Jaz drive. I did this by using 'cp -a' to transfer files from my scsi
hard drive to the Jaz drive. I then changed the Jaz drive version of
/etc/fstab so that it would mount /dev/sdb1 (the jaz drive) as / and
commented out the mount lines for the normal scsi hard drive / and
/home partitions. I made a boot floppy for this configuration (copied
vmlinuz to a temporary location, used rdev to set the root device as
/dev/sdb1 on the temporary copy, then used dd to transfer that copy to
a floppy). The problem is /proc -- I have tried three different things
with it, and all have their problems...
1.) If I cp -a the whole /proc directory to the Jaz drive, the boot (with
the boot floppy using /dev/sdb1 as the root partition) will proceed okay
until the initial login prompt. Then it basically freezes, and after a
wait, starts producing lines like the following:
scsi: aborting command due to timeout: ...
at which point it is necessary to push the reset button and restart the
machine, and boot into the Linuz which used the scsi hard drive as the
root partition.
2.) If I make a /proc directory on the Jaz drive, but do not copy the
contents of /proc from my hard drive to the Jaz drive, the same happens
as above, except that it doesn't get all the way to the prompt before
the scsi timeouts start; it gets through the lines about starting sshd,
then does what I described above. (If it helps, in a normal boot, the
next lines printed out at boot time after the one about sshd are
ones concerning starting remote file services and such.)
3.) If I totally ignore doing anything about the /proc directory on
the Jaz, the boot will proceed and will get to the prompt okay, but
will complain during the boot process. For example, after the message
about checking the root file system, it will print out the following:
mount: mount point /proc does not exist
loading modules: 3c59x modprobe: /proc/modules: No such file or directory
Or after the message about 'Starting kerneld, version 2.1.34 (pid 35), it
complains that
Apr 6 09:24:37 modprobe: insmod: /proc/modules: No such file or directory
There are several complaints of that flavor, as well as complaints that
are along the line of
Starting system log daemon: syslogdstart-stop-daemon: failed to opendir
/proc: No such file or directory
(this messages also occurs for daemons klogd, portmap, inetd, and cron).
I have heard that it should not be necessary to do anything with /proc.
I have the following line in the Jaz drive's /etc/fstab for /proc:
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
However, if I don't do anything with /proc on the Jaz drive, I get the
complaints listed above, and various utilities/applications (including
startx/X windows) are broken, presumably because it's not finding /proc.
On a side note, when boot with the Jaz drive as root, I always have to
go through the full fsck of the Jaz drive because it hasn't unmounted
cleanly, no matter which option (1,2, or 3) that I have used above.
Considering the fact that it says "/ is busy" when rebooting from option
3 (not doing anything with /proc on the Jaz drive, which is the only
option that operates even semi-normally), I guess it's not too
suprising. But why does it decide that "/ is busy" for the Jaz boots
and not for the hard drive boots?
The reason that I am attempting to do this is so that I can have a
functioning Linux system backup which could/can operate independently
of the scsi hard drive. Any help that can be provided would be
greatly appreciated.
Maria Rightley
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