I burned an ISO of the Sarge netinstall CD using a Windows box and booted a
new box with this CD. The bootloader was able to read the CD, go through
all the hardware detection stages, format and partition the hard disk (one
large partition). When it got to the stage of rebooting with the new kernel
on the hard drive, it was unable to mount the installation CD so it could
not go any further. At first I assumed that this was either a bad ISO copy
or a bad CD drive, but here's what I tried and the results. Each successive
install did a complete wipe and repartition of the disk to create the
cleanest possible install.
1) downloaded and burned additional ISO netinstall images, both the 140MB
and 40MB versions: same result for three more CD's
2) put each CD media in the Windows machine CD drive: able to explore
subdirectories and read files without difficulty
3) ran netinstall off floppies accepting all defaults: still unable to mount
CD after otherwise successful install (2.4.x kernel)
4) ran netinstall off floppies using "expert26" command line option to get
2.6 kernel with purportedly better hardware detection ("linux26" command
line option does not work on Sarge boot floppies): still unable to mount CD
after otherwise successful install (2.6.8 kernel)
5) upgraded Sarge to testing in order to get any possible hardware discovery
updates: still unable to mount CD
6) upgraded the kernel first to 2.6.11, then to 2.6.12 when it came out:
still unable to mount the CD
7) added autofs package (which is really autofs4): still unable to mount CD
8) downloaded and burned a Knoppix CD ISO, booted Linux box with this CD:
Knoppix loads fine and the resulting system can mount and explore the
Knoppix CD
9) booted the Linux box from the hard disk into the testing Debian distro,
with 2.6.12 kernel: it could not mount the exact same Knoppix CD that would
successfully boot Knoppix
I think the last two tests show that it is neither the CD drive nor the
physical CD media itself. When I try to mount the same Knoppix CD manually
(specifying ISO9660) after a Debian bootup, dmesg shows a long string of
seek errors for each successive sector. My newbie guess as to what's going
on is that the hardware drivers installed by the Debian releases are unable
to operate the CD drive, but the drivers in the Knoppix 3.9 distro can. Is
that plausible?
I would love to be able to use the CD drive. Any suggestions for what to
try next?
The hardware setup is:
IBM 300PL model 6594-A3U
Pentium III/800
384MB RDRAM (Rambus 800MHz)
20GB HDD as first IDE master
48X Lite-On CDROM as second IDE master
S3 Savage4 AGP video
Here's some additional feedback from the standpoint of a computer-literate
but Debian first-time installer (with very old and rusty UNIX skills: SunOs,
pre-Solaris BSD) wishing to get away from Windows.
I read the Sarge installation docs and as much of the Debian Reference
Manual as I felt applied before doing the installs. One thing that I could
not accomplish was the fact that the BIOS in this particular machine did not
allow me to turn off shadowing for either the video BIOS or the main BIOS.
The Debian docs did say to disable shadowing of the video BIOS, but were
silent on the main BIOS. The docs, however, did not say what to do if you
_couldn't_ disable shadowing of these memory regions. Is it possible that
the video BIOS shadow RAM happens to be where the CD driver or some other
file system piece loads (and Knoppix is smarter about not using that memory
region)? I would guess that the shadow RAM function is a one-time
ROM-to-RAM copy during hardware boot, so reusing that memory region later
would not be a problem, but I really don't know how this works. Again, I
would guess that overwriting this memory region after bootup would force the
cache to be correct for any pieces of it that remained in the cache, but
that's just a guess. I don't even know if this memory region is cacheable
or if Debian attempts to use it.
Another detail that was not mentioned in any of the install docs (that I
could find) was the BIOS setting for Plug-n-Pray OS. This vintage BIOS,
though upgraded to the latest available for that motherboard, has a setting
Yes/No for this. I tried installing both ways with no difference in the end
result, but the Debian manuals should probably list the preferred setting in
case it makes a difference on any systems or at least a statement that it
doesn't matter, if that's the general case.
Thanks in advance for any advice.