Hello, all,
I thought I would give Debian a spin, so I downloaded the 1.1 (kernel
2.0.0) disk images and rawrite2.exe. (I checked all my floppies for bad
blocks.)
I got to the point where the final base disk had just been read. At this
juncture I got the lovely message:
hda: read_intr: status = 0x59 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error}
hda: read_intr: error = 0x40 {UncorrectableError}, LBAsect = 2247884,
sector = 131084
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:04, sector 131084 Kernel
panic: EXT2-fs panic (device 03:04): read_inode_bitmap: Cannot read inode
bitmap_block_group = 8 inode_bitmap = 65542
Hmmm, I am trying this on my new (and amazingly cheap) 133MHz PCI 586
motherboard with 8M RAM and L1/L2 cache. My disk is a Maxtor 71626A IDE
with 1.6Gig (C/H/S 3158/16/63). I already had dos, etc installed on half
the disk in one primary and one extended partition. I created two new
primary partitions for Linux in the course of the installation process. (I
did NOT check them for bad blocks, as presumably this is unnecessary for
these modern disks.)
The motherboard is very new and has a fancy AMI BIOS. It has a built-in
PCI IDE controller, and the BIOS setup allows you to tweak settings for the
IDE, like LBA mode, block mode, 32-bit mode, and PIO mode. During the
installation, LBA mode was on, block mode was on at 8 sectors, 32-bit mode
was on, PIO mode was auto, which meant the machine was coming up with PIO
4. I don't know if this has anything to do with it.
The installation also failed with all the fancy IDE stuff turned off
(except LBA).
I noticed that when the kernel was spewing out its various hardware
identification messages, it acknowledged my IDE and noted that the controller
was using LBA. However, it displayed cylinder/head/sectors of 789/64/63,
not the real 3158/16/63.
I tried booting with "linux hd=3158,16,63" at the boot: prompt. This
didn't seem to help. The kernel startup messages generated seemed to be
identical, and subsequent attempts to access the disk failed in the same
way. I also looked for CHS-mapping-related options in
cfdisk, but there didn't seem to be any.
I will now try some more experiments on my own, but ...
Oh mighty gurus, please shower this unworthy mortal with advice!
Thanks,
Kevin Murphy
P.S. The only other blip I experienced during installation was the fact
that the debian install.txt file misstated the usage of rawrite2.
P.P.S. The only other annoying thing during installation was that sometimes
the spawned programs would generate messages which were immediately obscured
by the installation window's reappearance. In some cases I could catch a
brief glimpse of words like 'error', but the installation program didn't seem
to find anything to get upset about. It would be nice if there were an
obvious way of reviewing the actual output of these programs, if necessary.
