Hi everyone,
This is an account of my troubles when installing Mandrake 8.0. As
you'll see, strange things happend when new kernel versions arrive...
My setup is as follows:
PIII 800 on a ASUS P3B-F (I know, it should not support a processor with
a 133mhz front bus speed but strangely enough, it works like a charm ;)
256 meg (PC133)
30 Gig WD hard drive.
Promise ATA-100 drive controller: seen as scsi controller by the bios,
used to be recognized as /dev/hde in Madnrake 7.2)
2 cd-rom (writer and reader) on Secondary ide controller (/dev/hdc &
/dev/hdd)
Primary IDE channel is disabled, thus leaving IRQ 14 free for the
Promise controller.
The rest is not relevant and you'll soon see why:
The installation went well and smoothly only when I rebooted:
The kernel loaded fine but panicked at the start of the "interactive
setup" part of the boot. It mentionned that it could not find the
/dev/hde6 device
(that's the / partition).... That's strange because it just booted from
/dev/hde5 (the /boot partition) so if it could boot from one partition,
it should be
able to locate the next one on the same drive. After a few minutes of
trial and error (lilo: linux root=/dev/hde6), I tried booting with the
floppy created during install. To no avail! Things weren't looking up
when I tried something else...
Let's suppose that the kernel renames /dev/hde to /dev/hda after it has
booted.
The boot got one step further, mentionning that it could not mount
partition /dev/hde6 on / This meant I was on the right track. So, I got
a copy of
Tombsrt (the mini distro on a floppy), disconnected the hard disk and
installed it on the mobo's primary IDE channel and rebooted in tombsrt.
Then, I mounted
the / partition while in tombsrt. I changed the fstab entries to rename
all references about /dev/hde to /dev/hda. Shut down the machine,
reconnected the HD to
the Promise card and rebooted the thing.
It worked, at last...
Now my question is: Why does this version of the kernel (2.4.3 I
believe) remaps devices like this? This does not make any sense!
Just my 2 sense (s)!
