Ossama Othman wrote: >The machines both have two Adaptec 7890 and one Adaptec 7860 SCSI chipsets >installed. Each machine also has a gigabyte of memory and four Intel >Pentium II Xeons installed. In order to get RedHat to work we had to fool >the kernel into thinking that it had less than a gig of memory since it >can't seem to handle more then about 1020MB (confirmation anyone?) of >memory.
2.0.x maxes out at 2^30-2^26 = 1006632960 bytes, or 960MB, of RAM. Thus, you'll wanna use "mem=960M". You can also adjust some headers (I forget which) to expand the kernel memory / virtual memory split (it is adjustable, and it defaults to 1GB/3GB). >Second we also had to tell the kernel to prevent the aic7xxx >driver from probing since it causes the system to crash if it does probe. >Here is the boot line: > > boot: linux mem=1000M aic7xxx=no_probe > >The RedHat boot disk does no probing at all since SCSI drivers appear to >be loaded during the installation process, not during the boot process. >OTOH, Debian's kernel loads several SCSI drivers (right?) which appears to >be causing my system to crash. The system crashes right after the IDE >detection boot step. > >Is it possible to shut off all SCSI support at the "boot:" prompt? If >not, can anyone suggest a solution? Since RedHat's boot technique appears >to work well in situations like mine (new hardware, probing causes >crashes), can we or should we do something similar? > >Are there any new boot disks available besides the ones that were released >last on 12/29? I can't make my own boot disks since I currently don't >have access to Debian system and I don't want to use master or va to >create boot disk images. You can switch out the kernel on the rescue disk on any linux system fairly easily: # dd if=resc1440.bin of=/dev/fd0 # mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt # cd /mnt # rm linux # cp /place/i/have/my/working/kernel linux # ./rdev.sh # cd / # umount /mnt Yes, the rdev.sh script does require that you mount the disk on /mnt. Make sure your rescue disk contains ext2, msdos, ramdisk, initrd, and ELF support. Happy booting. -- Robert Woodcock - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "It's like a love-hate relationship, but without the love." -- jwz, on linux
