Package: installation-reports
Version: 13-Feb-2013
Severity: installation failed.
I have syslinux booting xp and memtest86+ on a laptop. syslinux
was installed on xp natively. By that I mean that I downloaded
syslinux.exe from syslinux site, and used it to install syslinux on
xp's ntfs file system. I then downloaded memtest86+, and added an
entry in syslinux.cfg for it. So I can boot MS xp, or memtest86+.
I want to install debian on the laptop too.
I added a debian-installer entry to the existing syslinux.cfg file.
That part of the installation worked. I was successful to boot the
installer in this way. But I couldn't get the installer initrd to
work. I think it has to do with the Ali M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE
controller. At least that is what xp is reporting about the hardware.
According to xp, the controller has no IRQ settings. The primary and
secondary channels are set in xp to IRQ 14 and 15. According to a
Google search, that is a normal arrangment with this controller.
I tried 4 sets of kernel and initrd:
1. hd-media
2. cdrom: a gtk, and plain versions.
3. netboot.
I think all of them were downloaded from
http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/wheezy/main/installer-i386/current/images/
, and the version is of 13-Feb-2013, but I am not sure of that. It
could be a later version by a few days at most.
1. hd-media
With this pair of kernel and initrd, the machine got rebooted by
itself almost as soon as syslinux got the initrd, or is it the kernel,
running. By experience with xp I know that the machine reboots
itself if it senses that there is a problem to boot the HD.
2. netboot
With this pair of kernel and initrd, I got a kernel panic. Before
the panic details, I could see that
List of all partitions:
No file system could be mount root, tried:
That is why I think there was a problem to recognise the Ali M5229
controller. The boot messages up to the kernel panic were running
too fast to be able to see if the controller was recognised.
Perhaps you should allow a CONFIG_BOOT_DELAY, or something similar?
Due to the kernel panic, I had to reboot with the appropriate sysrq
combination.
3. cdrom
The results with a plain cdrom kernel + initrd were similar to that
of the netboot kernel + initrd. With the gtk version, I got what
seem to be an infinite loop. I couldn't see the details. It does
seem that each iteration in the loop ended with an error message
about something related to x.org configuration file. Does that make
sense? Since there was no kernel panic, I could reboot using
the alt+ctrl+delete combination.
Two final comments:
1. I think it is a good thing that sysrq is working. I think it is
not documented in the installation manual. It should be. It
could help non developers too. And also introduce them to a
useful feature of the system. For me, I would otherwise need to
reboot my laptop the hard way.
2. Pehaps the ability to boot with syslinux should be mentioned in
the installation manual?
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