On Wednesday 30 May 2001 12:13, Patrick Mayer wrote:
> 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)!
Well, now I know who to contact when I want to use a sledgehammer to crack an
egg!
The install kernel has the option to detect off-board IDE controllers first
disabled. The boot kernel has it enabled. This causes this problem for
several rigs. It is not easy to remedy, because the install kernel gets too
big for a floppy image when you compile it with the option enabled.
Moreover, some hardware pretends to be embedded and works anyway. Some that
actually IS iembedded like the ASUS A7v series works fine. One board with an
on-board HPT370 showed this problem.
I am still trying to build an install kernel that will fit a floppy with that
particular option enabled. If I succeed, it will be in a tips and tricks
page on the mandrake website.
Civileme
