I tried Sunday several times to install Debian 2.2 potato on this machine:
Dual P-II 450 MMX processors, 256MB RAM
SCSI Adaptec 7895
Two 4GB wide SCSI drives
Two older IDE drives, one 3GB and one 10GB
AWE64 sound card
Realtek NIC that runs very well with the n2k_pci driver
ISDN to the network at the office via a Cisco router (company supplied)
External V.everything USRobotics modem for personal use
Matrox G100 video card with 8MB VRAM
HP P1110 monitor (also company-supplied; wish I could afford one of my own)
During installation I made a boot disk because there has always been a
problem booting from SCSI, even though the BIOS allegedly supports it. The
Linux system and data files reside on the SCSI disks. The small IDE is
devoted to a VMware partition and the big IDE is used for 1st stage backup.
Two things:
1. It takes about three to five minutes to read linux off the boot floppy and
2. Boot stops cold at the shift over to runlevel 2. No error messages, no
hints. Stops. Dead in the ether.
The installation itself went well, but I was concerned because I never saw
an option to select for an SMP kernel and because the disk partitioning
system threw me. I like several partitions and didn't seem to have the
option to do the work I wanted, even though I had laid out everything on paper.
So I opted out to a shell and used fdisk to set thing up the way I like
them. On the first run, I set up:
/dev/sda1 /boot
/dev/sda2 /
and so on. When the boot-up failed, I restarted the installation and did
fdisk this way:
/dev/sda1 /
/dev/sda2 /boot
with a swap partition for each SCSI disk just to be conservative. A look at
df showed that all partitions were very lightly populated. I switched root
to the first partition because I thought that might be the boot problem,
even though under Red Hat 6.1 it was on /dev/sda3.
After the second installation and with a new boot floppy, same problems as
listed above, 1 and 2, both.
So, after flailing around for about six hours, I pulled out the RH 7.0 CDs
and had everything up and running in an hour or two.
Now, this isn't right, people. Someone said "apt-get rules" and I believe
that to be true. I have this same distribution of Debian running on an old
HP Vectra at work and I *really* like the apt and dpkg tools.
Any ideas what could be stopping the boot at runlevel 2?
---
Bob Rowe Would-be Linux nut
Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Eat a live toad in the morning and nothing worse
can happen to you for the rest of the day.
